I Get Me P Plates Tomorrer...

TheLoadedDog · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 1:27 am Post subject: I Get Me P Plates Tomorrer...

The last few days at work I've been learning to run an awesome machine. Well, to call it a machine is not entirely accurate. It's a system of conveyors, but to call it that is a huge disservice to it. It covers an area about the size of the MCG, and has three kilometres of track, with spaghetti junctions that would make a Railcorp signaller's eyes pop out of their heads. It's the Tray Management System.

If you've been to a Woolworths/Safeway depot or a TNT one, you might have seen one. But it'd be a baby version. The one here and the one in Dandenong are the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. It's computerised to all fuck, it's worth about $50M (nobody knows for sure because it's been added to and extended), and it's seriously cool. I can't take photos of it, and I can't find anything good online either. But it's a bit like the movie Metropolis with weird shit going everywhere thirty feet above my head. The software is diabolical, but it does mean I get to use little screens around the centre that are placed in huge metal boxes that make it look like 50s sci-fi (something about operating computers standing up does that).

Since I'll be controlling all the mail in and out of the centre, I'm mildly shitting bricks (smallish ones), but am also looking forward to it. The regular person will be there, but tomorrow, they'll be purposely placed on other duties and will only intervene if I fuck up.

Fuck, I'm looking forward to it. I do hope you haven't posted anything important. BWAHAHA!
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The idiot who, in railway carriages,
Scribbles on window-panes,
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
In Parliamentary trains

Foamer_1 · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 2:12 am Post subject:

Haha look forward to receiving no mail from Sidnee for a couple of days, both at work and home.... Hey wait.... PAYROLL is in Sydney, no beer if TLD fucks up.... GOODLUCK TLD, hope all goes well for ya!
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TheLoadedDog · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 2:27 am Post subject:

Thanks, man. It should be orrite. I'm just sorry that I can't better describe this thing (or get photos of it), coz it's Bastard-friendly. You lot would enjoy my workplace. Lots of high tech machinery and also Asian totty.

It's a bit like the baggage handling system at a major airport - but a lot fucken more complex in that it's not slowly taking big objects (20kg suitcases) to twenty or so gates, but is taking smaller ones at higher frequency to many more destinations. It takes fifteen minutes for mail to go through the thing at brisk walking pace. It's automated in that I don't have to "drive" it in any strict sense, but I do have to "balance" it, so for example, if there are 1000 "slots" (paths for you gunzels) available, I can assign, say, 100 to Melbourne mail. If we get 200 Melbourne trays, then 100 are just going to spin around forever, reducing the capacity of the system of 1000 by 10% to 900, so I might see that Brisbane has 100 assigned, but we're not getting much, so I can borrow BNE space and assign it to MEL, but then I might have to reverse that later. Then there are a dozen or so Sydney metro destinations, other interstate and country ones, and internal destinations (mail going to machines).

Think of it as a 700 metre long circular "main line" with incoming and outgoing branchlines (maybe fifty of 'em). I have to find the paths on the main.
_________________
The idiot who, in railway carriages,
Scribbles on window-panes,
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
In Parliamentary trains

Foamer_1 · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 2:54 am Post subject:

The description you have given makes it sound you would be considered 'over qualified' if you ever went for a train controllers position!

It 'tis a shame your unable to take photographs etc as in another thread you posted a youtube clip of a mail sorting gizmo thingabob and it certainly had me interested. Just the sheer speed of the thing and it's ability to switch tracks almost seemlessly was amazing, do they send an extra envelope the wrong way often, ie instead of sending 6 envelopes down a certain track a 7th gets through?
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My other car is a Dash 8

TheLoadedDog · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 3:04 am Post subject:

Skraw · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 7:36 am Post subject:

So when are you running an open day? Shit-eating grin

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MJJA · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 6:09 pm Post subject:

That beats the machine I saw at SSMC (Clayton) back in the days when it was operating. It was only the size of an F-111 hangar.

I got a guided tour over that machine twice in fact... once just with the family, and once with a bunch of other homeschool kids. This was before the terrorism scare of course.
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BH160159 · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 6:46 pm Post subject:

So thats why incoming cheques take so fukin long to get to you
and the fuckin bills come in like lightning eh TLD Shit-eating grin

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Stick that one up your arse! side ways

TheLoadedDog · Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 11:11 pm Post subject:

We used to do open days in the old days. We'll do them again when you can go on a tour of the St James tunnels or when you can sign yourself into a railway yard and go for a wander on your own. So don't hold your breath.

Today went orrite. Was fun but also a bit hairy. Fucken two way radio was a cunt (at one point, I had the two-way and TWO fucken phones on my belt - but at least you can ignore the phones to a point "oh sorry, it was on charge"): I wanted to throw it over the fence onto the goods line - cunts wanting answers to weird, esoteric questions and wanting 'em right away: "599's over-queued by 94, and the towers aren't full, and nothing in the CASI. Are they on the TTS?"

"No, but YOU'RE getting on my TTS... **ahem** May I get back to you with that little nugget of information?" (ya cunt, I've been busting to do a nugget of my own for the last two hours).

Etc.
_________________
The idiot who, in railway carriages,
Scribbles on window-panes,
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
In Parliamentary trains

TheLoadedDog · Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 12:23 am Post subject:

Argus Tuft · Joined: 18 Jun 2007 Posts: 1259 Location: Jakarta

882seu4me · Joined: 21 May 2008 Posts: 42

hey dawg

you might remember the original Fold Spindle and Mutilate machines at Redfern? That was a long time ago!

Now for the railway link. I had a mate that used to do holiday work at Redfern in the days of hand sorting. Whenever he, or his other holiday mates, found something addressed to somewhere that they had not heard of, the item was chucked into the Mudgee Mail bag. Who remembers TPO's? There was so much stuff that went to Mudgee, and back for a while.

As for progress, my mum would drop a letter into a post box at 7pm on a Sunday night outside Sydney Town Hall, and this letter would crash into my weeties at boarding school in Bathurst at a little after 8am the next day. Bring back TPO's.

And Dawg, good luck with the conveyor.......
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TheLoadedDog · Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 11:15 pm Post subject:

The "big day" was kinda a fizzer, in that I did a bit of it yesterday, and a lot more today, so it's not until tomorrow that I'm set loose on it alone - but I'm not worried about it now because it's all finally clicked in my head, and I'm starting to wring a lot of production out of the system.

Yeah, the LSM was a first generation sorting machine from the 70s. French tech, and it did simply stand for Letter Sorting Machine. But it was "Dumb" and had no OCr tech in those days, so there were banks of sheilas manually coding the mail - but it was still faster than a hand sort.
The speed of manual versus automation is a bit difficult to judge at first. It might take a person barely less time to key a postcode than to throw a letter into a pigeon hole, but the savings are made down the line where it's sorted again. So a manual sorter might send Mudgee to Bathurst, but when it gets to Bathurst it has to be hand sorted again. The barcode is Mudgee from the beginning here in Sydney, so it can be done at high speed by a machine Bathurst. Etc...

I missed out on the Redfern days by about five years - and kicking myself. That place was legendary. Missed out on the TPOs too, but apparently it was a dream job. Finish sorting by about Katoomba, and suck piss the whole way. Take the motel allowance, cash it, and sleep in the carriage on a bed of mailbags and footwarmers. Once a week, you didn't even do the trip - it was overstaffed and your mates would clock you in and out.
_________________
The idiot who, in railway carriages,
Scribbles on window-panes,
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
In Parliamentary trains

TheLoadedDog · Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 12:27 am Post subject:

And since I'm bored and still up at the 'puter, I'll edjumacate y'all about the barcodes that are all over your mail these days.

Mail runs through machines left to right, so the barcodes on the front of yer letter are arse-backwards (they are read right to left like Arabic).

You will probably see flourescent coding across the bottom of the front of the envelope. There's a whole bunch of it on the right, and another lot on the left. The right hand one is the postcode. It's a simple system and is human-readable (if you know the codes). The only one I remember is that || || is 2 and |||| is 0, so Sydney 2000 would be (right to left) |||| |||| |||| || ||. I forget the others (or never learned them).

The one on the left is the machine number. Somebody with the appropriate scanning device could tell you it was originally coded at MLOCR 544 in Sydney or whatever in Perth, etc.

There's often another one on the back. This is a TAG code. This has no postcode or machine information as such, and is really an almost random number. It's like the wrist tag that a newborn baby gets first thing. It's that letter's identity. This is the first thing to go on the letter, before the OCR reads the address. Everything subsequently is reconciled to this code. So, if the machine can't read the address on the first pass, it'll still have a TAG code, so if the letter has a digital image taken of it and sent to remote human coders later in the day, it'll be fed back through the machine, and the system will say, "Aha! It's w456746gds346574 (fugdifyno what they look like) so it must be going to Gympie QLD".

The black barcode above the address on some mail is a more modern thing - it represents your address as a unique entity in Australia. Every mailing address in the country has one. These use plain old black ink, which makes the technology available to any cunt with a PC and a printer. The big mailers (such as electricity utilities, banks etc) love these because they can bypass the OCR stuff, and so we give them a discount on their postage.

So that's what those weird squiggles on your mail mean. And get fucked.
_________________
The idiot who, in railway carriages,
Scribbles on window-panes,
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
In Parliamentary trains

major Pecs · Joined: 15 Aug 2007 Posts: 62

Very interesting stuff. Never thought that mail sorting could be interesting but then maybe it's because I went for a PO Box sorters job many, many years ago and my mum ended up getting the job instead! She stuck with it for years longer than I ever would have, probably a good thing.