To: All Employees
From: The President
Re: Thank You to Essential Workers
All of us here at the Schenectady Small Arms & Biscuit Co. are aware of how deeply the pandemic has affected our lives. Sales of our cookies and artificially cheez-flavored crackers rose to unprecedented levels, as Americans sought comfort and consolation in packaged snack foods. Our stock value rose by 152%, making my own stock options, which were fortunately backdated to 1843, extraordinarily valuable. Your executives and board members have prospered as never before, and of course we have done our duty as Americans by pouring that money back into the economy, causing a significant uptick in orders for the gilded-lawn-statuary industry.
All this is possible through the heroic efforts of our valuable essential workers. Even in the worst of the pandemic, you kept at your jobs, or were brought back to them by the local police under certain emergency powers which my wife’s nephew the sheriff assures me were totally constitutional. Many of you paid a high price for your loyalty. At one point in the middle of last year, our factory boasted the highest infection rate in North America, an accomplishment we bested only a month later when we beat out our own Brazilian division for the highest infection rate in the Western Hemisphere. It must be candidly admitted that our workplace-safety team dropped the ball here, owing to a trivial misreading of CDC guidelines on workstation separation. Who knew that a single tick mark could make the difference between feet and inches?
Yet in spite of the high infection rate, you all worked long hours, loyally remaining at your stations, and once again I should like to thank my wife’s nephew Bud for that.
Now that we have come through the worst of it, the economy is booming, and our market position is more secure than ever. It seems to me, therefore, that it is high time we rewarded the essential workers whose labor made all this prosperity possible. Accordingly, you will be happy to know that I have directed our graphic-design department to produce a 16-by-20-inch poster with the slogan “HEROES WORK HERE” in Helvetica Light type on a white background. (We chose Helvetica Light because it makes a more efficient use of limited ink resources.) A copy of this poster will be displayed on the wall opposite every single production line to show our brave essential workers how much their contributions are valued. After all your hard work and dedication, it’s the least your management team can do.
With warmest regards,
J. Rutherford Pinckney,
President