Working in the development department of a small nonprofit, you send out a mind-blowing amount of mail. Email does make some communication fast and easy, but it is no excuse for a good old fashioned hand signed letter. Letters of thanks, letters of solicitation, letters of recognition, etc. you name it and I have a sweet template already prepared for you, ready to be mail-merged, and printed out on our high impact stationary all in under half a shake of a dog’s tail. I’m that good!
The crucial step next step is of course actually getting it into the mail. Perhaps my greatest change I’ve made at work, the one I am most proud of in my stay there, has been to convince my boss to purchase a letter-folding machine. This glorious piece of machinery is actually quite simple. I’m not stupid enough to put any fingers in it, so I can’t be 100% sure of the actual process, but it seems to be two rollers that fold the letters up real quickly & nicely. The sound it makes… like lil’ angel’s bells.
Guests to our office are often quite surprised if they are lucky enough to walk in when this baby is up and going. Sure, it may only be able to handle 3 sheets at once & every once in a while it’ll flip out and ruin a letter, but it’s quite a machine.
Our postage meter machine is, one the other hand, a disgusting and useless device. Surely nothing to write home to mom about, it just barely & pathetically affixes proper postage to our letters.
And then it’s some classic glue sticking to close up the envelopes and get them out the door. Once we had this crazy volunteer that insisted on licking the envelopes herself. Haha, we still get a chuckle out of that at the office.
You must be thinking, “You have a fantastic letter folder, there must be some way to automate the rest of the mailing process, and money is no object, I’ll put it on Daddy’s credit card”
Well, I think me and your Dad’s cc might be heading down to postal pimps Pitney-Bowes and picking up one of these babies. 210 letters a minute? yes Stamp, Stack and Seal? hell yeah! Some type of intellilink technology? why not?
It’s this type of breakthrough that reaffirms my faith in human-kind.
Of course human nature being what it is, I can’t help but let my thoughts wander a bit. I love our lil’ folder, but maybe one of these too?
I have definitely developed an unwholesome infatuation with postal machinery, let’s see where this goes!
Recent Phots
Three sheets? That’s it?? I dunno Bater … seems like there must be a better letter-folder out there. If not … time to get out the old invention pencil.
Maybe something in a … Martin Yale High-Speed Paper Folder? “18,000 pages per hour.”