It’s an omen that your passport card is fairly worthless, and you got burned spending the money on it.
CrownEatingParasite on
“Do not bend, perforate or expose to extreme temperatures”
wolftick on
Some sort of accidental lens focusing sunlight on it at some point in its travels?
jellyn7 on
I wonder if that’s where the chip was in the envelope. Happens to library books with rfid chips that get too hot, like placed near a heater. Or a microwave.
sndtech on
It got stuck in the sorting machine, the burn is from a wheel that pushes the mail along still spinning while the mail piece was stationary.Â
derverdwerb on
These are friction burns from mail sorting machinery.
I have no idea what machinery the relevant postal services use, but this looks pretty similar to the letter injuries I’ve seen working at Australia Post. When I was at uni I worked night sort on the sorting machines, and I saw this kind of thing more than daily.
Letter-sorting machinery often uses pairs of giant rubber bands between rollers to convey letters down rails, then eject them into the destination stacker. There are often a few sets of rails (two for the ancient OCR machine I used to operate, four for the massive barcode sorter, and one for the sequencers), and a letter will pass every possible stacker on the relevant rail until it arrives at its target, when it gets diverted by essentially a pinball machine paddle. For the barcode sorter we used to use, with 384 stackers on four rails, a letter would have to pass 96 sets of rollers (plus the set in the feeder) to get to its endpoint.
Jams occur frequently but are usually very rapidly correctable. If a letter fails to divert or convey, it can fold or otherwise jam in the mechanism. This *should* be detected by an LED that stops the machine if it remains occluded too long, but if not, the machine keeps running and once in a while you’ll end up with a cluster fuck of 30,000 letters per hour getting yeeted all over the joint until someone spots it and hits the emergency stop.
Any time one of those jams occurs, a letter can get stuck between rollers that have kept turning even though it can’t move anymore. I’m willing to bet that’s what’s happened here.
We used to be pretty good at spotting letters that would jam. Any damage, paper stock too light, any rigid object inside the envelope, etc. But you’re feeding 30,000+ letters per hour, and sometimes you miss them or you get surprised.
Also, for a bonus trivia point, our sorting machines were made by military aircraft manufacturers: Northrup Grumman for the OCR and Lockheed for the barcode sorter, iirc.
7 Comments
It’s an omen that your passport card is fairly worthless, and you got burned spending the money on it.
“Do not bend, perforate or expose to extreme temperatures”
Some sort of accidental lens focusing sunlight on it at some point in its travels?
I wonder if that’s where the chip was in the envelope. Happens to library books with rfid chips that get too hot, like placed near a heater. Or a microwave.
It got stuck in the sorting machine, the burn is from a wheel that pushes the mail along still spinning while the mail piece was stationary.Â
These are friction burns from mail sorting machinery.
I have no idea what machinery the relevant postal services use, but this looks pretty similar to the letter injuries I’ve seen working at Australia Post. When I was at uni I worked night sort on the sorting machines, and I saw this kind of thing more than daily.
Letter-sorting machinery often uses pairs of giant rubber bands between rollers to convey letters down rails, then eject them into the destination stacker. There are often a few sets of rails (two for the ancient OCR machine I used to operate, four for the massive barcode sorter, and one for the sequencers), and a letter will pass every possible stacker on the relevant rail until it arrives at its target, when it gets diverted by essentially a pinball machine paddle. For the barcode sorter we used to use, with 384 stackers on four rails, a letter would have to pass 96 sets of rollers (plus the set in the feeder) to get to its endpoint.
Jams occur frequently but are usually very rapidly correctable. If a letter fails to divert or convey, it can fold or otherwise jam in the mechanism. This *should* be detected by an LED that stops the machine if it remains occluded too long, but if not, the machine keeps running and once in a while you’ll end up with a cluster fuck of 30,000 letters per hour getting yeeted all over the joint until someone spots it and hits the emergency stop.
Any time one of those jams occurs, a letter can get stuck between rollers that have kept turning even though it can’t move anymore. I’m willing to bet that’s what’s happened here.
We used to be pretty good at spotting letters that would jam. Any damage, paper stock too light, any rigid object inside the envelope, etc. But you’re feeding 30,000+ letters per hour, and sometimes you miss them or you get surprised.
Also, for a bonus trivia point, our sorting machines were made by military aircraft manufacturers: Northrup Grumman for the OCR and Lockheed for the barcode sorter, iirc.
Burn Notice