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Writer's pictureJoe Andrews

Speaking of: The US Postal Service

Email makes sense to me; you log in to a web portal using your specific credentials, type out a message and a recipient address, and that message gets converted into binary and transmitted through your network across an array of email web servers until it is delivered to the appropriate email address, where it sits waiting for the person with the complementary login credentials to come along. Texts make sense to me too, with the process being pretty similar to email except it's sometimes cell towers transmitting the data instead of web servers.

For the life of me, I can't make sense of how the regular postal service works. Every time I drop an envelope into an "Outgoing" box, it feels slightly like a magic trick. How will they for sure read the penmanship used to write the address? How can they efficiently deliver mail when we all still handwrite addresses on envelopes? How come more things don't get lost?

It's a truly remarkable institution that I simply never want to use.

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