I was heading to the clock at the end of the day to clock out when somebody spotted me and told me that I'd been paged to the MDO's office. I had three minutes until it was time for me to clock out. I walked in and spotted the supervisor and asked what was up. I was then escorted into the back office where my partner was sitting. The supervisor apologetically told me that she had to conduct an investigative interview, which can lead to discipline. We were both mystified about what this might involve, but then she came out and told us that two trays of our 34102 mail in blue trays had been found in the spread area yesterday, at noon. Even worse, when they were found, the information was given to the MDO while he was in a meeting with the plant manager. The bigwigs had their eyes focused on us, and not in a friendly way.
She wanted to know why it hadn't been run, and when the last time I'd checked the spread area had been. I explained that I'd gone to pick up the blue tray mail for my other run at around 3 a.m., and I'd checked the 34102 GPC at that time, which was empty. We'd already run all of the mail in that GPC. The mail in the blue trays is local-originating and comes off the machines being run by Tour 3. They usually finish up before 1 a.m., and were long gone when I did my final check of the spread area. Therefore, no new blue trays should have appeared in the spread area after that time.
I told the supervisor that what probably happened is that someone found the mail mis-spread in with their trays of mail, and rather than walking all the way to my machine to give it to me, they just dumped it in the GPC in the spread area. I also pointed out that if they'd just inducted the mail into the UTS, instead of fooling around with spreading the mail by hand, it would have come to my machine and been run, instead of being mis-spread through human error. I know that I've found more than one tray of mis-spread mail in my GPC on occasion, and I've always taken it to the machine that was running that mail. Apparently not everyone is that conscientious.
My partner was livid about the whole thing. As he noted, it's stupid to hassle two of your hardest-working, most conscientious clerks about something that may not even have been their fault. There was no chain-of-custody on where those two trays came from.
It was pretty obvious that the supervisor didn't want to have to do the investigative interview, but that she was getting pressured from above. She was coy about who was doing the pressuring. I don't know why. I don't have any problem at all about talking it over with the MDO or even the plant manager himself. I know that I do a damn good job, as good a job as anyone in the plant, and I take pride in that. And I'm not intimidated by anyone, no matter what title they may wear. That's probably because I'm not bucking for any kind of promotion. If I was, I might be some kind of yes-man lackey myself. But that's not my style. Never has been. Never will be.
