Correspondence
Four ways to reach this company, one way not to, and an honest accounting of what has become of the mail room since the Office of the President took an interest in its efficiency.
Write to us. Nobody does, and it puzzles me. We are the largest privately held hole in North America, we employ 1,247 men and women under the Upper Peninsula, and the sack that comes up the county road most mornings would embarrass a hardware store. So write to us. This sheet tells you where to send it, how long it ought to take, and — because Records insisted, and because Records is right about this one thing — what may happen to it once it is inside the building.
What Reaches Us
The post reaches us. The gate house takes the county sack at seven, and three days after you drop a letter in a box in Cleveland it is on a sorting table in this mine. That is the United States Post Office, which is a very good outfit and does not get told so often enough.
The cable reaches us fastest. APERTURE UPMICH, forty minutes, day or night, and the operator on the surface reads it aloud into a telephone whether or not the recipient has asked her to. If your business is urgent, cable. If your business is confidential, do not cable, and do not blame the operator, who has been told twice.
The telephone reaches us, at ENrichment 9-0943. Ask for the second floor. Do not ask for the third floor. If you ask for the third floor you will get the third floor, and then you will be talking to me, and I have not yet met the man who planned that conversation as far as its second sentence.
Your own two hands reach us best of all. The gate house at the head of Shaft 09 has had the same man in it since 1951, he is awake at all hours, and he will take a document out of your hand and put it in the right room the same morning. A volunteer form goes there and only there — Form ASI-302 is not to be posted, and the reasons are two sections further down this page.
The Vent
In the spring of 1955 somebody had an idea about the mail room. That somebody was me, and I want my name on it, because the idea was a good one and the arithmetic still is.
The mail room is six men out of the Records Department’s twenty-two. Before 1955 those six men carried thirty-odd thousand items a year up four flights of stairs and eleven hundred feet of elevator shaft, on foot, in a building where the journey between two desks is longer than the journey between two towns. So we connected the mail room to the pneumatic diversity vent. Ninety miles an hour. Second floor to Sub-Level 4 in nine seconds. A day’s walking abolished before lunch.
Records has asked me to describe this in print as a fault. It is not a fault. A fault is a thing behaving otherwise than as designed. The vent moves what you put into it at ninety miles an hour, which is exactly and entirely what it does — to the letter, to the envelope, to the string, and to the gentleman from Accounting who in October leaned in to see where the noise went.
What this means in practice is that correspondence now arrives at ninety miles an hour, in pieces, and occasionally on a floor nobody addressed. Records has built a system for sorting mail by fragment. It uses a light table and a roll of gummed tape, it recovers better than two letters in five, and it should not have to exist.
And three times since November an item has come out of the mail-room terminus bearing a postmark later than the hour at which it landed on the table. Applied Sciences was consulted. Applied Sciences went very quiet and asked whether they might keep the envelopes. They may keep the envelopes. If a man can put a hole in one wall and take it out of another, the post office is not a special case, and they can stop looking at me like that.
One item presently in the held file is addressed to a member of staff who is not on the payroll. Records has checked the payroll. Personnel has checked the payroll twice and then checked the applications, which is not the same thing and was a good instinct. The name is a woman’s. The hand is not one we hold a sample of. Personnel has been instructed to file it forward.
Addresses Of This Company
- By post
- Aperture Science Innovators
The Enrichment Center, Test Shaft 09
Upper Peninsula, Michigan - By cable
- APERTURE UPMICH
- By telephone
- ENrichment 9-0943
- By hand
- The gate house, head of Shaft 09. Any hour.
- By rail
- The company spur. Freight only. Do not send a letter by freight.
- By vent
- Not an address. Not a chute. See below.
- In person
- By appointment, which is refused.
There is a second sack. It comes on Thursdays and it does not go to the mail room. Twenty-two since January, all the same kind of letter, all asking the same one thing. I answer them myself, in longhand, at my own desk. He has never seen one and he is not going to. — C.
“A letter that arrives before it was sent has still arrived. File it under the date on the envelope and stop telephoning me about it.”
Delivery, By Route
Correspondence handled in the calendar year 1958, by route, with average transit and condition on arrival as recorded by the mail room.
| Route | Items | Average transit | Intact | Records note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| U.S. Mail, county sack to gate house | 22,140 | 3 days | 99% | Nothing whatever the matter with it. Recommended. |
| Cable, APERTURE UPMICH | 4,208 | 40 min. | 100% | Read aloud on arrival. This is not a service. It is the operator. |
| Telephone message slips | 9,600 | 2 hr. | 96% | The slip arrives intact. The message is another department’s affair. |
| By hand, gate house to second floor | 1,204 | Same day | 100% | The gate house has never lost an item in eight years. |
| Interoffice, on foot, second floor to third | 6,880 | 11 min. | 88% | The twelve per cent is the stairs, and the men on them. |
| Pneumatic vent, mail room to Sub-Level 4 | 3,377 | 9 sec. | 41% | Sorted by fragment. Reassembled where the tape holds. |
| Pneumatic vent, Sub-Level 4 to mail room | 3,377 | −31 hr. | 12% | Records is not accepting questions on this row. |
| Diverted; floor not determined | 812 | Not determined | — | Recovered eventually. Most of it. See Form ASI-208. |
| Held file, undeliverable | 31 | — | 100% | Addressees not on the payroll. Nine of the thirty-one are addressed in the same hand. |
The two vent rows carry the same figure because they are the same 3,377 items, counted at both ends. Records is aware that the totals for this table do not reconcile and has, after four years, stopped attempting to make them.
A Memorandum From Records, Reproduced In Full
Interoffice Memorandum
This department has requested the disconnection of the mail-room terminus on four occasions: June 1955, September 1955, March 1957 and the present date. Each was acknowledged. None was actioned. The position is therefore set out once more, in the plainest terms available.
The terminus discharges into the sorting room at ninety miles per hour at a height of four feet two inches, which is the height of the sorting table and of a seated man’s head. Six men work at that table. A screen was fitted in April 1957 and was recovered from Sub-Level 6 in June.
This department does not raise the matter of the fourteenth of November, which is described on Form ASI-208 and which this department declines to describe again. It raises only the following: the item recovered that morning was not an item.
Records asks for a valve, a screen, or the disconnection of the terminus. Records will accept any one of the three and has ceased to have a preference.
Denied. It is nine seconds, Frank. Fit the screen again and bolt it this time. — C.J.
Reply Card
Cut along the dashed line, complete in ink, and hand it to the gate house or drop it in a box in your own town. No postage is required if mailed within the continental United States. Postage is required if mailed from within the Upper Peninsula, for reasons of a local arrangement this company cannot explain.
Aperture Science Innovators — Reply Card, Form ASI-108-R
The nature of your correspondence
- An order. See the catalogue and quote the number.
- An enquiry as to employment. Personnel, second floor.
- An offer to volunteer. Sixty dollars, cash, same day.
- A complaint. See Form ASI-900 before writing, and then reconsider.
- An invitation. The President regrets that he does not travel.
- An enquiry concerning a person who came here and has not yet come home.
That is the whole of it. Post to the gate house, cable if it is urgent, telephone the second floor, and hand it over yourself if it matters. Everything sent to this company is read. Not everything sent to this company is answered, and I will not pretend otherwise on a sheet with my name at the bottom of it.
Now write to us.
Cave JohnsonPresident & FounderForm ASI-108, fourth revision. Dictated 2 April 1959. Set from the dictation, not from a corrected draft.