Admin Corner

[#1]

I've been getting curious lately about the people whose nicknames have been showing up more and more often in the forum - who are they? what do they do? and what brings them to the User  Forum? One way to find out, I figured, was to get on the phone and talk to someone... so I did.

When I called Dave Parsons this week, he said it was 5 below zero.  “We’re feeling pretty good,” he said. “That’s about thirty-five degrees warmer than it ought to be this time of year.”  Dave, known on the forum as FNSBSDmailer, runs the Mail Center at the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District in Fairbanks, Alaska.  Like a lot of Alaska, the district is huge – almost exactly the same size as New Jersey.  It includes 35 schools and three other work sites and all of their mail comes in and out through his facility – about 1,000 pieces a day with peaks of up to 10,000 pieces.  It’s all processed through their DM1000 Mailing System.  Now Dave’s lobbying to add a DI950 inserter to his floor to streamline the mail preparation process.  “One department had 8,000 letters to send out,” he said. “It took a temporary staff person three weeks to label, fold, and stuff the envelopes.”

 If you’ve followed Dave’s posts on the forum, you’ve noticed that he has a lot of expertise in processing e-Certified mail, commercial based pricing, and other postal regulation issues.  One of the challenges of his job, though, is getting his constituents to think about those rules when they prepare their mail.  “I swear, these people will mail a post-it note with a 10x13 mailer,” he says in one forum post.  It took Dave a year to get his purchasing department to buy 6x9 envelopes instead of the 6½ x 9½ size so they could be sent First Class Mail®.  Unfortunately, when the new envelopes came in, they were the self-sealing type and had to be sealed by hand, not machine… so nobody wanted to use them.  Managing a mail center – like most jobs – turns out to require a large dose of managing and educating the people around you!

Dave is no newcomer to forums and online communities.  Back in the pre-web days of dial-up access, he set up and ran a subscription-based BBS for community discussion and information in Fairbanks.  Besides encouraging conversation among visitors, he published minutes of school board and borough meetings, TV schedules, weather reports, and other essential local information.  On the Pitney Bowes User  Forum, he likes to share his hard-won knowledge.  “When there’s a question about something I know I’ve struggled with, if I can answer it, I will.”  I asked Dave what he thought would make our forum better.  “Talk to us more,” he said. In the regular forums, having users answer each others’ questions is great, but in the Think Tank, Dave would really like to see a lot more feedback and discussion from PB about the suggestions people are making.  Duly noted, Dave.  Thanks.

[#2]

Wonderful post, Mike. Great to learn more about you, Dave! 

[#3]

It's always nice to put an image and face to the screen name.  Excellent story also.  I really like this "About Me" blog.

[#4]

It's always great to learn more about the members of our community.  Very interesting read.  Thanks for your invaluable efforts in the community, Dave!

[#5]

Glad to have you on the forum, Dave!

[#6]

No one was more surprised than I was that Mike wanted to start this thing off with me, and I thank PB for providing for its customers a place to share knowledge and vent once in a while.

I would encourage those of you that just come here to read to go ahead and put in your two cents. It adds up.