Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Many problems are solved; many others are not solved. And then there are problems that are not solved, but they just go away with time.

The United States Postal Service, otherwise known by the often disdainful name of “the post office,” had a big problem. They had millions of envelopes a day that had to be sorted by people. This was slow and expensive. The post office undertook a massive project to build a machine that could read the various handwriting styles from millions of Americans and sort the mail “automatically.” Some of the history of this is chronicled in Wikipedia. There was some success in this endeavor. Much of the success was that companies or commercial mailers printed their address on envelopes in limited fonts. Early optical character readers worked fairly well.

Of course, this did nothing to solve the original problem – sorting all those envelopes adorned with hand-written addresses. People just wouldn’t write addresses by hand in nice, optical-character-reading characters. The machines didn’t work; the problem wasn’t solved. Efforts continued. Surely, one day, someone would solve the problem.

Before anyone solved the problem, time bypassed it. Electronic mail snuck in the door, and so did cell phones with their plans where long-distance calls were treated just like local calls (one day I shall have to  blog about the disappearance of the term “long-distance call”). The reason for sending a personal letter has just about disappeared. The envelope with a hand-written address has just about disappeared. I received two thank-you notes this week. Those were the only two envelopes that I received all week with hand-written addresses. I received about 50 or 60 other items in the mail – all from companies, all with address labels printed by machine so that a machine could read them.

I supposed all that money spent trying to solve the problem brought about some good. They money never solved the problem. Time passed it by.