University of Virginia Library

Rockland And Washington: Quaint Tranquility Vs. Automated Bustle

Mechanized Motion At Incredible Speeds

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The post
office building here takes up
an entire city block. The huge
front lobby, full of bustle and
animation, greets arriving
postal customers. Security
guards, badges on chest and
guns on hip, stand in corners
and among walls.

The Washington, D.C., post
office is a center of constant,
24-hour activity. Five thousand
employees in three shifts tackle
the job of processing millions
of pieces of mail every day.

Stepping from the quiet
security of an elevator into the
frightening noise of one of the
mail processing rooms is a
traumatic experience. It means
being thrust into the noise of
an automated world, as if the
computer revolution had swept
through in a whirlwind,
engulfing everyone.

At first, there seems to be
no pattern to the flurry.
Letters and parcels are
transported throughout the
gigantic room on conveyor
belts. Workers carry boxes and
bags of mail coming in from
every imaginable place and
shoot them through the
process that ultimately leads to
their delivery.

But the appearance in this
case is a deceptive one. A letter
in the Washington post office is
not processed through a series
of haphazard steps. It is sent
along an assembly line, where
it is filtered through machines
at incredible speeds.

Letters start through the
assembly line in a bin that
funnels them through a
canceling machine. There are
seven of these machines in the
Washington office,
automatically canceling each
letter with an electronic eye.
At the rate of 18,000 letters an
hour, these machines cancel
the stamp or reject the letter
because it either lacks a stamp
or it bears a counterfeit one.

Letters that pass this
checkpoint are carried via
conveyor belt to areas of the
room designated for either
incoming or outgoing mail.

The next stop of the
automated journey is a
contraption called the
Burroughs machine. Rows of
employees sit in front of keys
resembling those of a
typewriter while a mechanical
arm shoves 60 letters a minute
in front of them. Within only a
second, the personnel working
at this machine find the
address' zip code with their
eyes and type out the first
three numbers of the code The
machine does the rest,
automatically sorting the
letters and dropping them into
slots with other pieces headed
in the same direction for
delivery

After being thrown into
hampers marked for different

destinations, the mail finally
reaches the end of the line in
Washington and is taken out to
trucks bound for train stations
and airline terminals.

Trucks arrive and depart
constantly. From this
particular post office, mail is
taken to sectional centers, and
from there it reaches the
thousands of small
neighborhood post offices.

John McDay, a postal
employee for 25 years and my
guide through the process,
seems to have done it all during
his career He has worked on
train mail cars that is, when
most trains still had mail cars
He was around before any of
the new machines or postal
procedures were envisioned,
and he has worked under the
different procedures of the
Postal Reform Act

There has been a
tremendous change in Mr.
McDay's job over the last few
years. "Automation is the main
difference," he said
"Everything used to be done
manually, and it was hell lifting
those heavy bags of mail."

Not all of the old methods
used to process mail were bad,
according to Mr. McDay. He
reminisced about mail cars on
trains: "We used to process the
mail while it was on the way to
its destination, and sometimes
the delivery was faster. But
there aren't many mail cars
anymore. Train companies say
they cost too much." As time
goes on, the old ways change.

Mr. McDay led me to the
now deserted area where mail