You’ve Got Mail
I work for a Fortune 100 company. I work on the second floor of the corporate headquarters of a Fortune 100 company. My cubicle number is 2D8369. I’ve had the same cubicle for 5 year. Until recently, I had a mail slot in the same copy room for nearly 7 years. Where is my mail slot now? I have no idea. I believe mail at my company routes like this: the Post Office (or UPS or FedEx or whatever) delivers mail to our loading dock. The guys at the loading dock then sort the mail using a cross between voodoo and tea-leaf reading into bins for one of the 25 administrative assistants in our building. The administrative assistants report to Vice-Presidents who have 50 to 100 people reporting to them. The ‘admins’ as they are known, then choose how to deliver mail to their intended recipients. Sometimes the mail is dropped on the recipient’s desk, sometimes delivered to a mail slot, sometimes delivered to a manager’s desk, or, I suspect, not delivered at all.
A couple of months ago the admin for my VP moved to a different building about a mile away. She sent me an e-mail saying that she had mail for me and asking how would I like it delivered. Somehow it made it to the copy room near my cubicle. It was a Christmas card from a vendor I work with. I got it in May.
About a year after I started working for this Fortune 100 company, I put my corporate address as the billing address on my American Express account. I quickly changed it to my home address after I was assessed a late fee due to the mail problems.
A few months ago, someone decided that a good way to publicize some corporate event was to put a flier in every mail slot in every copy room in the building. I took mine, and about 50% of the fliers disappeared from the slots in the copy room I frequent. The remaining fliers gathered dust, clearly in mail slots that no one was paying attention to.
About a month ago, my mail slot disappeared. Technically the label with my name on my mail slot disappeared. The slot is still there, unlabeled. I have no idea if I have a mail slot somewhere else, or whom I should ask. I don’t get anything except junk mail from vendors, so I don’t particularly care, except out of fascination that a Fortune 100 company could have such a crappy process for delivering mail. Clearly we do many things right to get to the size and scope we are. Mail delivery to employees is not one of those things. I had contemplated mailing stuff to myself to see what might happen to it, but it wasn’t worth the cost of a stamp to find out.
Today, I got the following message from someone in our out-sourced mail-room staff:
From: [Mail room dude]Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2009 4:49 PM
To: me and 31 other people
Subject: Mail
Hello.We have some mail for you here at the [company] mailroom in [city, state]. We do not have your name in our mailing list. Do you have an administrator who handles your mail, or do you have a mail stop near you where we can deliver it?If you are not located in [city], do you have an associate here who can forward your mail to you?Thank you.
How do I respond to this? “I had an administrator who likely moved my mail slot but failed to tell me its new location.” Or this, “I’ve been in the same d0g dam cube for 5 years, why can’t you figure it out?” or perhaps “I’ve been working for [company] for 7 years and my name isn’t on your mailing list?” or “There is a mail stop near me, but my name isn’t on a slot for you to put it in” or finally just “2D8369 is my cubicle. I have no mail slot.”
Seriously.
