Word: targetting
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...launched in 1977 and flew by Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1981, sending back spectacular pictures and mountains of data. Last week, still in good health after more than eight years in the void, Voyager 2 had closed to within 46 million miles of Uranus, its next target. The spacecraft's early shots of the mysterious planet, which is four times as large as the earth, were transmitted across 1.8 billion miles of space to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. They depicted Uranus as a fuzzy blue-green ball, showed its five known moons and barely discerned...
...something or other and included in its return address a number, 02173-8087. So here it finally was, the unrememberable nine-digit ZIP code. Actually the awesome thing was officially "implemented" in the fall of 1983, but only 4% of all items in the mail carry "ZIP + 4." The target of this particular request could not recall ever having been asked to use a nine-digit return address...
...should the Target react? Must he docilely accept this new aggravation? If he ignored the ZIP code entirely, thus challenging the U.S. Postal Service to try to find the historic town of Lexington without any numerical clues to guide it, would the letter go hopelessly astray? Sure, he has heard the postal authorities' soothing declarations that the nine-digit ZIP is designed to move mail faster and at a discount to firms that use it, but he suspects that if that thing poking under the edge of the tent looks like a camel and smells like a camel, it probably...
...Target has already been numbered and repeatedly renumbered. God blessed him with an easy Social Security number, something on the order of 007-17-1717,[*] but he is so often commanded to provide his wife's number that he had to memorize 018-22-0930, no easy feat in middle age. The New York Public Library knows the Target as 0000522838, while the Metropolitan Opera Guild thinks he is 212-711-2, Saks Fifth Avenue identifies him as 28 121 309, and Brooks Brothers calls him 296 2743 22. To the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, however...
...expected to remember such numbers, of course; no one except a computer. That is why they are printed on every check, or on the driver's license, ready to be shown to the highway patrolman who has just seen the Target run a stop sign. The computers apparently can't deal with a complicated concept like the name Otto, but they will know almost instantaneously whether F18332, etc., has forgotten any parking tickets or whether the 22-digit bank account includes any checks that bounced...