Address detectives

According to the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph, Royal Mail been forced to hire an extra 3,000 workers to decipher bad handwriting on an estimated 400 million poorly labelled packages and envelopes.

The 3,000 extra staff, known as "address detectives" will join 1,400 permanent staff employees who decipher addresses that cannot be read by the Royal Mail's automated sorting machines.

Postwatch, the U.K.'s postal watchdog, says five million Christmas cards are destroyed each year by the Royal Mail because they do not have a deliverable or return address marked on them.

Bad spelling, illegible handwriting and neglecting to include the postcode have been highlighted as reasons for post not arriving at its intended destination.

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