A story of going the extra quarter mile. In the 90s I…
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A story of going the extra quarter mile.
In the 90s I worked at an office where we handled employee benefits for a Fortune 500 company.
One afternoon they showed us a short film about the early days of Fed Ex. In the film, one of the their delivery vehicles was stuck on top of a mountain and was snowed in.
All roads were closed and the packages were going to be held up for an undetermined number of days so two employees rented a helicopter and flew to the truck and got the packages back to their distribution center and everything got there on time.
The film was all about going to extra mile to get the job done.
Well, we got back to our desks and the afternoon mail delivery hadn’t happened yet. Usually it was there around 2:30 pm and it was almost 4:00.
We had a couple of urgent inter-office packages from corporate that we needed to finish our work. It’s boring stuff but just know that the high-ups on the Fortune 500 company’s office in New York always threw a hissy fit when these particular reports didn’t get done on this day of the week.
Apparently, it held up whole departments and caused huge problems on their end.
Anyway, our company occupied three buildings in an office park so I called someone I knew in the next building over and she said the mail delivery was there but it was hung up in their mail room because one of the two people that sort mail was out sick that day and the other guy was way behind and wouldn’t be able to get to it until the morning.
I went to my boss’s office and said “Hey, the afternoon inter-office mail drop off hasn’t happened and it won’t happen until to tomorrow. I called over there and they said I can come get it as long as I sign off that I received it. I’ll be back in about ten minutes.”
Note that the building was about 750 feet from our building and they are connected by walkways.
He lost his mind “We can’t have our employees going over to the next building, we need you to finish the reports.” (The same reports that could not be finished until the mail packet was received).
I explained to him that we need the mail to do the reports but he was adamant that we can’t have our people doing someone else’s work so I told him I would direct any complaint calls to him.
So he got some calls the next day and I didn’t rush to get the work done.
source
In the 90s I worked at an office where we handled employee benefits for a Fortune 500 company.
One afternoon they showed us a short film about the early days of Fed Ex. In the film, one of the their delivery vehicles was stuck on top of a mountain and was snowed in.
All roads were closed and the packages were going to be held up for an undetermined number of days so two employees rented a helicopter and flew to the truck and got the packages back to their distribution center and everything got there on time.
The film was all about going to extra mile to get the job done.
Well, we got back to our desks and the afternoon mail delivery hadn’t happened yet. Usually it was there around 2:30 pm and it was almost 4:00.
We had a couple of urgent inter-office packages from corporate that we needed to finish our work. It’s boring stuff but just know that the high-ups on the Fortune 500 company’s office in New York always threw a hissy fit when these particular reports didn’t get done on this day of the week.
Apparently, it held up whole departments and caused huge problems on their end.
Anyway, our company occupied three buildings in an office park so I called someone I knew in the next building over and she said the mail delivery was there but it was hung up in their mail room because one of the two people that sort mail was out sick that day and the other guy was way behind and wouldn’t be able to get to it until the morning.
I went to my boss’s office and said “Hey, the afternoon inter-office mail drop off hasn’t happened and it won’t happen until to tomorrow. I called over there and they said I can come get it as long as I sign off that I received it. I’ll be back in about ten minutes.”
Note that the building was about 750 feet from our building and they are connected by walkways.
He lost his mind “We can’t have our employees going over to the next building, we need you to finish the reports.” (The same reports that could not be finished until the mail packet was received).
I explained to him that we need the mail to do the reports but he was adamant that we can’t have our people doing someone else’s work so I told him I would direct any complaint calls to him.
So he got some calls the next day and I didn’t rush to get the work done.
source
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