Five Change-of-Address Records Before the 5:15 Release
You are a PSE clerk at a two-window station. At 4:55 p.m. your supervisor hands you five change-of-address records that a new employee keyed this afternoon from handwritten customer cards, and asks you to check them against the originals before the 5:15 release. No second keyer is available, and the source cards may not be altered. Two customers have already called this week about mail going to the wrong apartment in the same building, and the station's accuracy standard is 99 percent per batch. You have about 15 minutes. The five pairs appear in the first task.
1. Compare each keyed record to its original and list every discrepancy with its error type. Which record is clean? Original 1: R. Delacruz - 1420 W 9th St Apt 4, Erie PA 16502 → 88 Marne Ave, Erie PA 16511 Keyed 1: R. Delacruz - 1420 W 9th St Apt 4, Erie PA 16502 → 88 Marne Ave, Erie PA 16511 Original 2: S. Okonkwo - 305 Belleview Rd, Erie PA 16504 → 17 Presque Isle Dr, Erie PA 16505 Keyed 2: S. Okonkwo - 305 Bellview Rd, Erie PA 16504 → 17 Presque Isle Dr, Erie PA 16505 Original 3: J. Halvorsen - 62 Fairmount Ct, Erie PA 16509 → 914 E 38th St, Erie PA 16504 Keyed 3: J. Halvorsen - 62 Fairmount Ct, Erie PA 16509 → 914 E 38th St, Erie PA 16540 Original 4: A. Bhandari - 7 Linden Pl Apt 12, Erie PA 16503 → 4402 Zephyr Ln, Erie PA 16506 Keyed 4: A. Bhandari - 7 Linden Pl Apt 21, Erie PA 16503 → 4402 Zephyr Ln, Erie PA 16506 Original 5: M. Kaczmarek - 118 S Shore Dr, Erie PA 16507 → 23 Conneaut St, Erie PA 16508 Keyed 5: M. Kaczmarek - 118 Shore Dr, Erie PA 16507 → 23 Conneaut St, Erie PA 16508
Read the worked answer
Record 1 is clean. The other four contain one error each.
| # | Discrepancy | Error type |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | none | clean |
| 2 | Belleview Rd keyed as Bellview Rd | dropped letter in a street name |
| 3 | ZIP 16504 keyed as 16540 | transposition of the last two digits |
| 4 | Apt 12 keyed as Apt 21 | transposition of an apartment number |
| 5 | S Shore Dr keyed as Shore Dr | omitted directional |
Method that produces this reliably in 15 minutes:
- Compare field by field in a fixed order: name, street number, street name, directional, street suffix, apartment, city, state, ZIP.
- Read the keyed line right to left against the original. Reading forward, the eye supplies what it expects to see; reversing the direction breaks that expectation.
- Do not silently correct anything. Flag it, so the error is counted and the new employee gets real feedback.
2. If you could only flag one of these errors before release, which one, and why that one?
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The apartment transposition in record 4.
Rank the errors by whether any later control will catch them:
- A wrong ZIP is usually caught. City and state still read Erie, PA, and the mismatch surfaces at sorting equipment or at the delivering office.
- An omitted directional may be caught by a carrier who knows the street, though it costs a delay.
- A misspelled street name is caught by the carrier or by address-matching software.
- A plausible apartment transposition is caught by nobody. Both 12 and 21 are real units in the same building; the ZIP is right, the street is right, the city is right, and the carrier delivers it. That is exactly the complaint pattern already on file this week.
General principle: rank errors by whether a later control will catch them. Silent errors that pass every downstream check get fixed first.
3. What single process change would prevent most of these errors from reaching the release?
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Add an independent verification pass, and never let the person who keyed a record be the only person who checks it.
Cheapest first:
- Reverse-order read-back. The checker reads the keyed record against the source starting from the last field and working backwards. It costs about a minute per batch and catches transpositions a forward read does not.
- Flag, never silently fix. Every discrepancy goes on a tally by error type, so the supervisor can see whether the problem is spelling, digits, or omissions. Silent correction hides the error rate.
- Split the batch. Key one half, verify the other, then swap, so no record is keyed and verified by the same set of eyes.
- Review the tally weekly. If transpositions dominate, the fix is keying digits in pairs or reading them aloud in groups - not exhorting people to be more careful.