Happy Anniversary?

One of my jobs is to send out New Hires and Anniversary post cards. The new hires cards just have a little blurb on them welcoming them to the company and are sent out every month to all the people hired the month before which averages at about 30 cards. The anniversary cards are sent out every month also but to all the people celebrating an anniversary of their start date with us. So everyone who has been here from 1 year to 50, (yes we've had some here that long) they get a card. I send out about 200 of these each month but before I do I give the list of names to the Manager to mark the people he knows personally. I pull those out first and he writes a short note on them before they go out. All the rest just have a pre-printed messages and a printed signature.

Back in June our Manager retired and the Assistant Manager has been in charge. Because of this all cards were changed to have the Assistant Manager's name on them.

I just received a phone call from our print shop where they print all of the cards for me to send out. The lady there asked me to check my cards to see if any of them still had the old manager's name on them. A quick glance through tells me that they all have the correct name. She lets me know the reason she is asking is that another lady called her asking why we are still sending out cards with the old manager's name on them as an employee in her office has one. Huh? Not possible.

I keep all of the spread sheets that I use to make the mailing labels for the cards so I pulled them up and started doing a quick search by the employees last name seeing if I could figure out what month he would have received his card. If it was a recent month there is no way it has the old manager's name on it. I go through my lists starting with the most recent month and work backwards. I don't find his name until I get to January. I inform the lady from the print shop that the employee in question started in January so the card he has would be from then and was when the old manager was still here.

The only thing I can figure is that the employee must have pinned the card to his work station in a visible place and the lady who called the print shop must have only just noticed it and assumed it was recent. Why she cares I have no idea, but perhaps she should have asked her employee when he received his card first before bothering someone else.