I was trying to think of something to write about that didn’t involve the second coming of President Donald Trump. When you live in Canada and have a left of centre view of things, everything Trump says and does is wrong; Fifty-first State, tariffs, rule of law, disappearing people, and all the rest, it dominates every day life. But then I received a Government (of Canada) brown envelope in the mail, and that set me thinking about my jobs in the Government (of the United Kingdom).

What news was contained in my brown envelope today wasn’t good, I’ve been dumped out of the Seniors Dental Plan because our family income is too high to qualify, but I can live with that because, well, I’m socially minded and understand that we can afford dental treatment without Government help. Let someone else less fortunate benefit instead. But I digress.

The envelope, as you can see, is a lovely “half-letter” size and has a Government QR code for the postage, and not one but two nice little windows so that the address and reference can be read without having to write anything on the envelope itself. When I worked in Government, we had windowed envelopes, but just the single window variety, and they were not widely used as they were expensive to buy, comparatively speaking. It used to be that all outgoing letters were in windowed envelopes, but Margaret Thatcher took up office as Prime Minister and put paid to all that, so we were then in the business of hand writing addresses on envelopes, at least at the level of output most of us achieved when issuing letters. But then I moved jobs within the Government.

My new job involved running an office that issued around seventy-thousand cheques a year, related to expenses incurred by a national subset of the Government called the Royal Observer Corps. These were spare time people, engaged in unpaid work for the good of the nation, but they were entitled to out-of-pocket expenses. While all Government workers were paid directly to their bank accounts, even in 1985, the Royal Observer Corps folks were still getting cheques, posted to their homes, on a quarterly basis. We had a tabulating machine, and a machine to print the cheques, we even had a fancy machine that put the cheques in the envelopes, albeit that you had to feed the cheques into the machine one at a time. Of course, given that the recipient’s cheque had their name and address on it, we used a window envelope to avoid having to type or write an address on seventy thousand envelopes.

In those days, Government stationery came from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO). They held the money and the stock, all we did was order what we needed. The dreaded shadow of Thatcher loomed up quite quickly when HMSO arbitrarily changed the dimensions of the envelopes we used, “to save money”. The new envelopes, though, didn’t fit the cheques, and the window didn’t line up. That started a big kerfuffle when I had to get into an argument with HMSO in order to convince them that it was cheaper to supply the right envelopes than it was to retool our entire operation with new tabulators and envelope machines, just to fit their stationery. Fortunately we had sufficient of the old stock to weather the protracted argument, and HMSO did relent and start us back with the original sized envelopes eventually.

But things took a odder turn with further cost-cutting edicts from Thatcher. I ordered the requisite three months supply of envelopes, only to be told I could only have half the amount. I politely told HMSO that I couldn’t send only half the cheques out, but they were not to be moved. When I pointed out that each cheque had to go in an individual envelope (it was the law) and there was absolutely no room for economy, I was told that the HMSO budget couldn’t stand the use of expensive envelopes. To this day I can’t get my head around being told it was my problem that I could only have thirty-five thousand envelopes to send out seventy thousand cheques. Talk about “jobsworth”.

It took desperate measures to finally resolve the issue. I threatened to misappropriate money from our organisation’s operational budget and buy our own envelopes, and it was only that and the thought that I might usurp the authority of HMSO that finally made them see sense. Oh, and the very real risk that the volunteers who weren’t going to get their expenses cheque may very well walk off the job, all for the want of an envelope.

I’m glad to see, then, that the Government of Canada is happy to buy proper envelopes. They don’t yet trust to e-mail for these important communications, but as a tax payer and former envelope stuffer I’m happy to contribute to the purchase of nice envelopes.

As a postscript, not too long after the Great Window Envelope Scandal, we moved to a computerised expenses payment system where the recipients could opt to have direct payment to their bank accounts. It was a slow take up initially, until people worked out that their friends were getting their expenses two weeks before those still waiting on cheques. When I left that job, we were only issuing about twelve thousand cheques a year, so I guess someone at HMSO was happy about not having to buy so many windowed envelopes. What a happy ending.