My name is Holli Apodaca, and I’m a supervisor at the Remote Encoding Center, a Salt Lake City facility that helps determine where poorly addressed mail from across the nation is supposed to go.
My main job is as a data conversion operator. I enter information not read by Postal Service machines because of cursive, poor handwriting or other factors.
I also assist management by answering calls and assigning data conversion operators, who are called “keyers.” We have about 1,070 employees at the Remote Encoding Center, which is connected to 300 mail processing plants.
We have 1,100 keying stations in our 40,000-square-foot workroom. Each keyer performs about 7,150 keystrokes per hour and processes around 900 images per hour. Keyers get around 3.5 seconds per image to determine what input is needed, enter the information and hit “done.” We get a break every hour.
The Remote Encoding Center is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We are even open on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. We key about 4.2 million images a day and we keyed more than 1.5 billion images in the past 12 months.
The information we input helps ensure each mailpiece is delivered on time and to the right place. It helps the people in plants and the carriers to do their jobs.
I’m married to my high school sweetheart, Johnny. We met when I was 15 and he was 17. We got married 15 years ago and we take a trip almost every year to celebrate our anniversary.
I have three sisters, three brothers, seven nephews, two nieces and one great-niece. I share guardianship of my 23-year-old nephew, who has special needs, with my mom and younger brother. My nephew is a challenge, but he brings me so much joy.
“On the Job,” a series on individual employees and their contributions to the Postal Service, appears regularly in Link.