The process that results in Central Arkansans receiving their yearly Christmas cards starts with Barney.
No, not the talking purple dinosaur.
This Barney is a massive piece of purple equipment called an Advanced Facer-Canceler System.
"Barney" is the nickname given to the electro-mechanical mail handling system used by the U.S. Postal service at its Processing & Distribution Center in North Little Rock.
And on Wednesday night, Barney was hard at work helping sort mail 12 days before Christmas.
"There's a lot of activity, this is one of our busiest or biggest delivery days ... tonight," said Mike Hart, the plant director.
Hart led a group of media members through the distribution center, showing off the intricate, computerized and human controlled order of events that ends with Christmas mail being -- hopefully -- delivered on time.
Bar codes upon bar codes. An endless array of trays going from one point to another.
There's a Delivery Bar Code Reader that sorts 30,000-40,000 pieces of mail an hour into the order in which they will be delivered.
Plus, there's the high speed machine that takes pictures of each piece of mail -- the pictures you may see in your Informed Delivery app each day.
"Everyone knows where everything goes," Hart observed at one point.
Hart should know; this will be his 40th Christmas working with the U.S. Postal Service.
And it starts with Barney, who would sort through an estimated 352,000 pieces of mail Wednesday night.
In all, 250 Postal Service employees and Barney were part of a process that would end with 10 people on a dock loading up trucks to whisk the mail off to its intended destinations across the region.
From 2:30 to 9 p.m., 91 truckloads would be dispatched.
On Thursday, it would result in an estimated 1.3 million pieces of mail going out for delivery, along with 113,000 packages.
"These doors never close," Hart said as employees went about their duty on the dock.
Of course, this intricate operation -- which includes a part of Barney that is able separate mail with no return address (which isn't allowed to travel via plane for safety reasons) -- begs the question:
What happens to letters addressed to the North Pole?
"We do an Operation Santa and so we have a special holdout when someone uses that address. It gets automatically directed to the right location," Hart said.
Before those letters reach that location, though, they make a pit stop in the distribution center warehouse.
In the midst of all the meticulous chaos are a group of silver carts, mostly filled with plastic trays full of mail.
On one cart, all by itself was a smaller tray full of letters.
On the front of it was a small card.
Written in red marker, the card displayed the intended recipient: Santa Claus.
Letters to Santa Claus sit in a box to be sorted and shipped at the U.S. Postal Service’s Processing and Distribution Center in North Little Rock on Wednesday, one of the busiest nights of the year. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Stephen Swofford)
