User talk:2601:44:8600:C70:6944:371F:D1F6:9A92

Shortly after World War II the Post Office Department built, in Providence RI, its first totally mechanized Turnkey Postal Facility. The Postmaster was Harry Kizirian, a WW II hero and one of the youngest postmasters in the US. All of the equipment had been built in Europe and was totally unique. And the intention was to sort all of the mail in Rhode Island at the Providence Facility. This didn’t go over well with the postmasters of the smaller offices. Their pay was based in part on the number of their employees and if you took away their mail their pay could go down. And in the old Post Office Department politics ruled. In the 1970s, after the Post Office Department became the Postal Service and moved to zip code sorting on the Letter Sorting Machines (LSMs), the Providence machines were left out because they were different. As a result, no effort had been made to promote Zip code usage and as a result the usage in RI was the lowest in the US and, if I remember correctly, below 20%. Providence was a very interesting office. They had eight Letter Sorting Machines (LSMs) and because of the mail volume, only at Christmas did they need to use them all. So maintenance had each machines for a week at a time and the equipment was very well maintained. The office had mechanized equipment for cancelling mail and for moving sacks and trays of mail that other post offices wouldn’t have for years. Each LSM had over 300 separations but since the operators had to recognize an address and remember which separation it went to, they were using less than 200. And their error rate was relatively high. But it was now the Postal Service and Providence reported to the Eastern Regional Office in Philadelphia. The Region went to Headquarters in Washington with a very strong recommendation that Providence be equipped with zip code translators and showed that the handlings eliminated by the additional depth of sort (300 separations) would pay for the conversion. Washington made the argument that the poor zip code usage would eliminate any possible payback. So the Eastern Regional Customer Service had a story placed in the Providence newspapers about the pending change to the equipment and included a one page free zip code directory of Rhode Island as a supplement in the Sunday paper. And the zip code usage in RI soared to over 80% in just a few weeks. The new numbers convinced Washington and the Providence machines were modified. Area Mail Processing was instituted, mail from the small offices in RI was brought to Providence and the office became one of the more efficient mail processing facilities in New England. And Harry Kizirian, who claimed to know every employee (and most of their families) by name, was postmaster for 25 years.