Here We Go Again

If you’ve actually been reading these little posts of mine for a while, you may know I went through an inspection at work a while ago. I had someone with me for the whole work week, standing behind me in the office, walking behind me on the road, watching my every move for a week. I’ve even had a mail truck equipped with a GPS unit since that inspection so they can track my every move once I’m out of the office. I asked during the inspection, when they gave me the GPS truck, how long I was going to have it.

“Until the inspection is over,” was the answer I was given.

That was months ago. Apparently the inspection doesn’t end until I do something very wrong on the road that shows up somehow on the GPS. I’m not sure what, or how, but I’m sure they’ll let me know when it happens.

Anyway, we received word in the office earlier this week that there will be another inspection next month. This one office-wide, with everyone under the microscope.

Terrific.

Apparently this inspection has to do with all the changes they made in the office once they got all the new sorting machines on-line down at the plant. They want to make sure all the workers in our office are able to work as efficiently as those machines we now have to contend with.

They want us to have ‘machine-like efficiency’.

Here’s an example of the efficiency of their vaunted machines.

In my two trays of machine sorted magazines and large envelopes, I had a half-dozen magazines that were not even addressed for our town, much less anyone on my route.

Whoops!

Of my machined letters this morning, I received five trays. Each tray is two feet long, able to contain up to 24” of letters. Three of my trays were somewhat full. The fourth was less than half full.

The fifth contained one (1) letter.

Apparently, the machines, coming to the conclusion that this one (1) letter would not fit into the empty half of the tray ahead of it in the sequence, shunted a fresh tray into the sequence, ran the tray-filling machine I tray longer, took up one more tray’s worth of space in the big truck, and caused every human set of hands in the delivery process to handle one more whole tray. All for one letter. That couldn’t be put in the half-empty tray ahead of it.

I see I have to rethink my definition of ‘machine-like efficiency’.

I do not seem to be trembling in my boots.

Talk to you later!