At work, we are (apparently) trying to cut down on paper use. One rather good suggestion that has been implemented successfully since a few years now is the use of reusable envelopes for inter-departmental mail. These are yellow coloured A4 sized envelopes with a 3×6 grid of labels that can be filled in with details such as the sender, recipient, location and department. New users are expected to scratch out the last label, so that only one is unscratched (and not blank) at any given time. The system works.
“Cross out previous address. Use repeatedly until all spaces are utilized.“
What’s really fun is to follow the trail that your envelope has taken before it came to you…
Take this last one I have here: It had ping-ponged about ten times between some random guy in one of our offices and the Finance and Administration (F&A) department. Seems like someone has been sending in a lot of bogus claims that are time and again getting rejected!
Or there was this other one, which always goes from office A to office B. I wonder how does it return back to office A from office B. Does it have legs? Or wings? Or maybe it boomerangs back to the original sender. It is not completely outside the realm of belief that higher powers may be at play – such as magic straight out of the Ministry of Magic’s office in the Harry Potter series, where letters fly themselves!
I once also had the pleasure of receiving a used envelope that I had already used twice. Fun to see it come back to me time and again. Almost like a pet.
And there’s this friend of mine, whose girlfriend, also a friend and in the same company as the two of us, is in a different office half-way across the city. So there’s a packet that goes everyday inside of these very envelopes from one of them to the other. It’s filled with chocolates and, I’m told, lots of love. 
This is such a regular occurance, that the office boy now comes asking if there’s a packet to be sent across!
A particularly evil idea that comes to my mind is hijacking these goodie packets – people often use the evenlopes to send across birthday gifts, chocolates and other yummy stuff such as rasgullas and poha. Unless properly packaged, this is the last journey for the envelope – the sugary syrup and the turmeric flavoured oil make them rather unusable!
I’m going to suggest this topic for those sadist English professors who loath to innovate topics for the standard sixth-seventh-eighth grade essays: An Autobiograhy of the Inter-Departmental Mail Envelope.
