Mailroom Quotes

No job is beneath you. You ought to be thrilled you got a job in the mailroom And when you get there, here's what you do: Be really great at sorting mail.

So, how was work? You clearly missed me.” I put my hands on my face in embarrassment and he just laughs a bit to himself. “It was boring.” It’s the truth. “No one to antagonize, huh?” “I tried abusing some of the gentle folk in payroll but they got all teary.” “The trick is to find that one person who can give it back as good as they can take it.” He takes out a pan and begins to fry the vegetables in a single, stingy drop of oil. “Sonja Rutherford, probably. That scary lady in the mailroom that looks like an albino Morticia Addams.” “Don’t line my replacement up too quick. You’ll hurt my feelings.

Be the Mick Jagger of the mailroom, the Warren Buffet of bookkeeping and the Bono of stapler selling.

It's been well-documented that there is a growing sense of entitlement among young people. I have certainly seen that in my classrooms. So many graduating seniors have this notion that they should get hired because of their creative brilliance. Too many are unhappy with the idea of starting at the bottom. My advice has always been: 'You ought to be thrilled you got a job in the mailroom. And when you get there, here's what you do: Be really great at sorting mail.' No one wants to hear someone say: 'I'm not good at sorting mail because the job is beneath me.' No job should be beneath us. And if you can't (or won't) sort mail, where is the proof that you can do anything?

So together, Reader and Vincent used HeLa cells as the springboard to launch the first industrial-scale, for-profit cell distribution center. It started with what Reader lovingly referred to as his Cell Factory. In Bethesda, Maryland, in the middle of a wide-open warehouse that was once a Fritos factory, he built a glass-enclosed, room that housed a rotating conveyor belt with hundreds of test-tube holders built into it. Outside the glass room, he had a setup much like the Tuskegee's, with massive vats of culture medium, only bigger. When cells were ready for shipping, he'd sound a loud bell and all the workers in the building, including mailroom clerks, would stop what they were doing, scrub themselves at the sterilization station, grab a cap and gown, and line up at the conveyor belt. Some filled tubes, others inserted rubber stoppers, sealed tubes, or stacked them inside a walk-in incubator where they stayed until being packaged for shipping.

Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soon as fear begins to ascend, anatomically, from the pit of the stomach to the throat and brain, from fear of violence to the more nameless kind, you come to believe you are part of a horrible experiment. I learned to distrust those superiors who encouraged independent thinking. When you gave it to them, they returned it in the form of terror, for they knew that ideas, only that, could hasten their obsolescence. Management asked for new ideas all the time; memos circulated down the echelons, requesting bold and challenging concepts. But I learned that new ideas could finish you unless you wrapped them in a plastic bag. I learned that most of the secretaries were more intelligent than most of the executives and that the executive secretaries were to be feared more than anyone. I learned what closed doors meant and that friendship was not negotiable currency and how important it was to lie even when there was no need to lie. Words and meanings were at odds. Words did not say what was being said nor even its reverse. I learned to speak a new language and soon mastered the special elements of that tongue.

So many graduating seniors have this notion that they should be hired because of their creative brilliance. Too many are unhappy with the idea of starting at the bottom. My advice has always been: "You ought to be thrilled you get a job in the mailroom. And when you get there, here's what you do: Be really great at sorting mail.

We spend the first couple of decades of our lives trying to figure out who the hell we are. Some people never find out. They keep searching and searching and searching. Or they’ll be different people with everyone. Never any consistent presentation of who they are. But if we can realize by our mid-twenties who we are, we have to ask ourselves this question: Do we like who we are? If the answer is yes, then we should spend the rest of our lives maintaining who we are. If you think about it, it’s that maintenance of self that is constantly attacked, challenged, or compromised on a day-to-day basis—not just in the business, but in life. It’s what gives you the hills and the valleys. But if you can maintain who you are, then you become a magnet of consistency to which all the inconsistent elements spinning around in your little hemisphere are drawn. Those elements—the clients, people in the office, your family—want to know who they are. Your consistency can bring the same to their lives, and if it does, they’re going to want to stick with you. It worked for me. After nineteen months I was promoted to agent. As for the people who didn’t work hard, they were still in the mailroom. I was right and they were wrong. What I try to give to trainees today is an understanding of the business and what it means to have power. There are two kinds of power. Your primary power is your character and your integrity. Your secondary power is your learned skills: your people skills, what you do to make a living, what you learned in college, what you’ve learned in dealing with other people. You must, in order to be totally successful, have control of both sets of power. If I ask the question “What does it mean to be thoughtfully political?” the answer, other than “Being kind,” is “To think.” Think about what you want. Then think about the people who are going to help get it for you. Then be political and figure out how to make those people happy about giving you what you want. That’s what it’s always been about for me. If you can do that, you can do anything. That is the whole secret to Sam Haskell. I don’t believe in the pursuit of power. When it is earned and deserved, it’s just there. It’s just got to happen as the result of other actions that you take. Whatever power I have is only because I’ve lived my life the right way, I’ve worked hard, I’ve had character and integrity in everything I do.

All day I was surrounded by earnest men with furrowed brows who read Balzac in the mail-room. The more jovial ones delivered double entendres with a wry, jaded air, not coming out from behind their desks. Sex was something other people did. Sometimes the writers swept in with an exotic air, smelling faintly of alcohol, flushed and distracted. If they noticed you the first time, they would forget the next time they came in.

how would you account for the mail Sammy drew from all over the country? From insurance companies in Hartford, from chain stores in the South, from mail-order houses in the Middle West, people were writing that I could not have written Sammy without personal knowledge of their own mail-room boy who had run over their backs to become office manager, and in some cases company president.

His name is C. J. Skender, and he is a living legend. Skender teaches accounting, but to call him an accounting professor doesn’t do him justice. He’s a unique character, known for his trademark bow ties and his ability to recite the words to thousands of songs and movies on command. He may well be the only fifty-eight-year-old man with fair skin and white hair who displays a poster of the rapper 50 Cent in his office. And while he’s a genuine numbers whiz, his impact in the classroom is impossible to quantify. Skender is one of a few professors for whom Duke University and the University of North Carolina look past their rivalry to cooperate: he is in such high demand that he has permission to teach simultaneously at both schools. He has earned more than two dozen major teaching awards, including fourteen at UNC, six at Duke, and five at North Carolina State. Across his career, he has now taught close to six hundred classes and evaluated more than thirty-five thousand students. Because of the time that he invests in his students, he has developed what may be his single most impressive skill: a remarkable eye for talent. In 2004, Reggie Love enrolled in C. J. Skender’s accounting class at Duke. It was a summer course that Love needed to graduate, and while many professors would have written him off as a jock, Skender recognized Love’s potential beyond athletics. “For some reason, Duke football players have never flocked to my class,” Skender explains, “but I knew Reggie had what it took to succeed.” Skender went out of his way to engage Love in class, and his intuition was right that it would pay dividends. “I knew nothing about accounting before I took C. J.’s class,” Love says, “and the fundamental base of knowledge from that course helped guide me down the road to the White House.” In Obama’s mailroom, Love used the knowledge of inventory that he learned in Skender’s class to develop a more efficient process for organizing and digitizing a huge backlog of mail. “It was the number-one thing I implemented,” Love says, and it impressed Obama’s chief of staff, putting Love on the radar. In 2011, Love left the White House to study at Wharton. He sent a note to Skender: “I’m on the train to Philly to start the executive MBA program and one of the first classes is financial accounting—and I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with me when I was in your class.

I'd held my job in the mailroom of a heartless corporation run by sinister men in dark suits for over three months now, and today at lunch my boss' boss had nodded and half-smiled in my direction. My future was looking bright.

He wanted a single entrance to the building so that we saw each other as we entered. We had meeting rooms, restrooms, a mailroom, three theaters, a game area, and an eating area all at the center in our atrium (where to this day, everyone gathers to eat, play ping pong, or be briefed by Pixar’s leaders on the company’s goings on). This all resulted in cross-traffic—people encountered each other all day long, inadvertently, which meant a better flow of communication and increased the possibility of chance encounters. You felt the energy in the building. Steve had thought all this through with the metalogic of a philosopher and the meticulousness of a craftsman. He believed in simple materials, masterfully constructed. He wanted all the steel exposed, not painted. He wanted glass doors to be flush with the walls.

Your inbox is nothing more than a modern day mailroom. Is that really where you want to be working?” @DarrenHardy #JoinTheRide

Jack Pimento had begun his government career six months earlier in the mailroom without the required background check—a security breach that slipped through the cracks because of a government office laboring under the crushing hardships of overstaffing, nepotism and banker’s hours.

The rules were explicit: No employee, from the chief executive down to the lowliest mailroom clerk, could talk to the press without a PR minder in tow. The communications department ruthlessly monitored all press coverage, issuing stern correctives to newspapers or magazines that erred on so much as an executive title.

—You can cut the sugar, Blondie. I know exactly who you are. —And who, pray tell, is that? —You’re the one who comes in through the lobby and goes out through the kitchen door. Pleased by his own poetry, Litsky smiled for the first time in a year. —Ooh, she replied. What big teeth you have, Grandma. Litsky raised his glass in the affirmative and emptied it in her honor. —You want to know what this town is like? he said. I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like a waiting room. It’s the largest waiting room in the world. We’re all sitting on wooden benches reading yesterday’s papers, eating yesterday’s lunch. But every now and then, the door to the platform opens and the conductor lets one of us through for a ride on the Payday Express. Sometimes, it’s some scribbler in a mailroom whose story’s found its way to a big oak desk. Sometimes, it’s a dainty damsel—like your friend—who gets plucked off the farm. But sometimes, it’s for an average Joe like me.

Hoping my voice didn’t betray the way I felt, I swore I wasn’t hiding anything. But why couldn’t I have one thing for myself? My letters are opened by the mailroom. My body and hair are searched each time I reenter detention. My classwork and this notebook are read by adults. My letters to my sister are one thing I’m not ready to share. It’s not a small thing to want to keep this for myself.” (Violetta, Pg. 183)

Mike Kelleher from Obama’s Senate office was the person who stepped up to tackle the mess… He built the staff, drew up a ten-page strategic plan for the mail-room, wrote algorithms for a mail coding system, set up a casework decision tree, assembled a library of policy-response letters, and developed quality-control manuals.

Of all the letters I’ve received from readers, my favorite came from a homeless man. It arrived in a dirty envelope with no return address, and it was scrawled on neon orange paper. It was signed “Berkeley Baby.” It would never have made it past the New York Times mailroom after the anthrax scare. The letter writer turned out to have been the night rewrite editor on the metro desk at the New York Times before he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the mid-1970s. Since then, he had adopted the name Berkeley Baby and lived on the streets of Berkeley, California, near the university, a forlorn, sad figure not unlike the Phantom of Fine Hall. He wrote, “John Nash’s story gives me hope that one day the world will come back to me too.

Every department at Amazon, from the mailroom to the tech team responsible for the Kindle book delivery system, has a year-over-year improvement plan. How will we get better? What does the customer want from us? How can we use new technology to improve the customer experience?

If any class or race can be permanently set apart from, or pushed down below the rest in political or civil rights, so may any other class or race when it shall incur the displeasure of its more powerful associates, and we may say farewell to the principles on which we count our safety.