A typical story

stamps for fun and profit

In my workplace, we frequently send Thank You gifts to customers for various reasons -- mostly variations on Thanks for Not Dropping Us Like a Bad Marriage.  For Sarbannes-Oxley/industry history reasons, these gifts are not of substantial value.  They are not of any value, really,  but they are what we have to offer, so we make do.

I try to gussy them up a bit to hide their schlockiness by wrapping them, or attaching the gushy Thank You Note for which I have always been famous.

That pile of corporate swag has been sitting on the corner for my desk for an extra week for one reason only:  I don't have enough Thank You Notes for the full package.  Someone said this was a fairly typical dilemma than would occur in my life... but not theirs.

It's not a simple case of buying more notes -- They have them at the CVS and I know right where they are.  I can not expense them; they have to come out of my own conscious, so no I don't spend a lot on them.

Not everyone who gets a gift gets thank you note.  These things are hand crafted, and I don't have all day.

They are truly handwritten, but I have some stock text that I use -- one for the project manager, one for the customer, for her boss, for her staff, for the IT boy who grudgingly came to every status call and 10 minutes in would say, "Do you still need me?"  I realized that I was in danger of sending the same notes to people a couple of times a year if I didn't keep track of them, of course.  So I made a library of them.

So first I have to get the cards, them pull from the library, make sure I am not repeating myself (though I don't mind switching off within the same customer, with just a little tweaking), make sure I am not sending them a gift I have already sent and... that it is appropriate to the rank of the recipient and their role in this effort we are quote-quote celebrating.  And those do not always correlate.

This is how to complicate a task beyond reason, and to the point where you can say you don't have time to do it.    It's really not as hard as it sounds.







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