"What scant media coverage the REC has received has almost universally focused on the idiosyncrasies of bad handwriting. The thousands of letters addressed to S

"What scant media coverage the REC has received has almost universally focused on the idiosyncrasies of bad handwriting. The thousands of letters addressed to SANTA, NORTH POLE sent each year by grade-schoolers still honing their penmanship is a recurring motif. One keyer reminisced about envelopes decorated with hand-drawn pin-ups, barbed wire, and skulls that inmates at a local prison used to send, and which he would occasionally receive for keying in the 1990s. But according to several keyers I spoke with, the lion’s share of the five million items that pass through the REC each day are not handwritten addresses. Contemporary machine-readers, it turns out, can read handwriting with relative ease, leaving keyers to trudge through a bottomless pile of machine-printed detritus, much of it cheaply printed junk mail slung by mass marketeers."