There are many quirky things about working in the unique environment that is the office. A few weeks ago, the absurdity surrounding the travels of some newsletters across the country captured my imagination and my laugh chords, so I must relate the story here.I work in the BC/Yukon Division of my program and our head office is in Ottawa. Occasionally we get a box of pamphlets, newsletters, booklets, etc. sent from the Ottawa office to us, which we in turn distribute to everyone in the office, and our sites all over British Columbia and the Yukon. Once or twice a year, we'll gather all of our excess information packets and send them back to Ottawa. Sometimes these will get sent right back to us a few months later and we'll either invent a creative list of new people to send them to, re-send them to the same folks as the first time around, or wait a little longer and send them back to Ottawa again.
One of our regular mailouts is a seasonal newsletter updating everyone on what's happened since the last season. We get them four times a year from Ottawa and then send a few copies to each of our sites. About a month ago one of the sites, likely not realizing who was sending these out to them, sent a thick stack of the newsletters to our office as if they were relaying the information to us. I just sat there in disbelief holding this stack of newsletters. Was I supposed to send them right back to them? Send them back to Ottawa? So I decided, fuck it, and just stuck the whole thing in the site's file. What's even better? These files are all available to the public under the Access to Information Act. So if you put in a request to see this file, you could actually see for yourself the stack of newsletters that travelled from Ottawa, to Vancouver, to Northern BC, and back to Vancouver - just to be stuck uselessly into some folder. Now if that's not a ridiculous waste of time, energy, and resources to the point of absurd, I just don't know what is.
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