Did they ALL go out that way?
Several years ago, I worked for a small marketing firm. We often did direct mail fulfillment projects for clients, which we usually handled assembly-line style with every available employee pitching in as needed to complete various aspects of the project until it was done. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it was lucractive, and there was a general mentality at the agency that if we kept the fulfillment in-house, we kept a larger part of the revenue too.
On this occasion, the project was for a large client. It was complex, it had a tight deadline, and those of us expected to do the labor were already very busy with projects for our own clients. But this was our biggest account, so we all put aside our other priorities and got to work. We worked for two days, packing boxes with literature and promotional items, sealing and labeling them, and hauling them to the post office. At the end of the second day, we got everything with that day’s postmark to the post office dock just in time. When we closed up shop for the day, there was a sense of satisfaction and achievement among those of us who had participated in the project.
There were a handful of left-over mailers that needed to be labeled and addressed the next morning by our office manager, and she put them in the outgoing mail tray for our postman to pick up. Before he had done so, the project’s account manager walked by the stack and picked up the top one. Apparently the label was slightly askew, and he literally tossed the box onto our office manager’s desk. “Did they ALL go out this way?” was all he said as he walked out the door in a huff. Our office manager was indignant — as we all were — that the only comment she or any of us received on the whole project was dissatisfied criticism of an isolated imperfection.
Few if any of us that worked on that project are still employed at that agency, but we all remain friends and see each other fairly often. When any one of us has a hard-day story about any aspect of our new jobs — especially a story about our special talents being underappreciated or taken for granted — someone among the group is bound to empathize with the complainer by asking in an exasperated voice: “Did they ALL go out that way?”
- After filling 350 boxes in two days, it was good to get everything out of our dining room and into the U.S. Mail.
I’m remembering this now because I just spent several days working non-stop on a similar fulfillment project with an equally tight deadline. I was doing all the work myself, so I had none of the camaraderie we used to share on those previous assignments, but I felt all the satisfaction of hitting the project milestones with accuracy. I’ll admit, there were a few slow points when I thought for sure I had bitten off more than I could accomplish before the post office closed at 5:00 on Friday. But when the project was over, and I handed off the last few cases of labeled and posted boxes to the man at the dock, I took one last look at the stacks of nicely-labeled boxes with their coordinating first-class stamps.
“Did they all go out that way?” Yes, this time they did.