The Mail Monsters

When you dropped a Valentine’s Day card in the mailbox last week, you probably didn’t think twice about what happened to it on its way to your sweetheart.

If you mailed it in the San Fernando, Santa Clarita or Conejo valley, it encountered colorful characters with names like Barney, the Green Monster, the Cone, the Waterfall, Big Bird and the Mules. If you addressed it sloppily, it spent some time with Nixie.

Most are giant machines except for the Mules, which are about the size of George Lucas’ R2D2, and Nixie, which is a little box. They reside on 17 acres under a single roof in Santa Clarita, where the U.S. Postal Service processes 6 million pieces of mail every day, including the valentine you sent. If you ever want to know exactly what happens to your mail during its 20 stops through the maze of machines and the hands of some of the 1,500 people who work there, ask Jesse Alvarado.

He’s a Postal Service on-the-job instructor who also regularly escorts visitors on tours of the facility. A man who somehow combines great charm with great seriousness, Alvarado relishes explaining the novel sights visitors encounter.

His tour is like a visit to Oz, conducted by a friendly version of the famous wizard. Advance reservations are required. The one-hour walk generally begins at one of the building’s 59 loading docks where hundreds of trucks converge every day with mail collected from mailboxes and post offices. They are emptied with military precision, their contents immediately separated by automation into streams of parcels, packages and letters.

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Visitors follow the streams to “Barney,” a metal structure that looks like the Eiffel Tower turned on its side and painted purple. More automated sorting produces new streams, depending on whether envelopes are big or small and clearly addressed or not.

An electronic scanner finds the stamp on each letter and “cancels” it.

Then another machine scans the address and prints a bar code on the envelope so it can be machine-sorted by city, state and country. All this goes on at a pace of 36,000 letters an hour.

The bar-coded packages move on via an aerial maze of conveyor devices painted green (the Monster), some ending up at the top of a huge metal pyramid (the Cone), where they are divided again, or at a bank of sorting devices (the Waterfall) and put into hampers (by Big Bird).

From there, they are whisked away by motorized devices (the Mules) operated by postal workers, who seem to have fun driving them around. Signs over narrow passages read “No Mules” because pedestrian traffic gets priority. Recently, second- and third-graders from Foundation School in Van Nuys wanted to gather ideas during their tour for their own version of a post office. This week, they built a wooden, mail-sorting cubbyhole structure, printed stamps and set up a “window” at school to sell the stamps and take in letters.

Alvarado told the children to always address their letters clearly enough to be read by the automated scanning machines. To emphasize the point, he showed them a set of small boxes, about the size of a breadbox, with “Nixie” printed on their sides.

The slightly sinister-looking receptacles take the mail with illegible addresses. Alvarado told the youngsters that if a letter has to “go to Nixie” and be manually examined the next day, it could mean a piece of mail--such as a Valentine’s Day card--would arrive late.

BE THERE

U.S. Postal Service Tour, Santa Clarita Processing and Distribution Center, 28201 Franklin Parkway, Santa Clarita. By reservation only for groups, individuals and children over 6 accompanied by an adult. Hours: Monday-Friday 8-11 a.m., Tuesday-Thursday 5-7 p.m. Free. To schedule a tour, call Terry Lauermann at (661) 775-7835.