I think everyone starts in the mailroom at some point! It's a right of passage. Your boss has to throw something at you and order you around for at least two years.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I believe in opening mail once a month, whether it needs it or not.
Here at the house, I've been decorating it and getting it organized. My best friend moved in in October so I've been getting her settled. She's my personal assistant now.
Somehow in the public sector, if you start in the mailroom and spend your life getting promoted, it's unseemly.
Everybody notices if you're the last one in in the morning and the first one to go in the evening. Always remember that as an employee.
Ordering is difficult. It's like arranging pieces of music in a concert: What do you put first? What do you put after the intermission? I want the reader to be sort of surprised, to come to each story freshly.
I work in the house next to where I live. We bought a smaller house that I use as my office and the place where my two employees work... We've got tens of thousands of letters from kids stored all over the house in places you would usually put dishes and other things like that.
Whether you are a low-income elderly woman living at the end of a dirt road in Vermont or a wealthy CEO living on Park Avenue, you get your mail six days a week. And you pay for this service at a cost far less than anywhere else in the industrialized world.
If I'm just at the White House, I have meetings in my office, I sign letters, I plan different things. Late in the afternoon, I'll quit working and wait for my husband to get home.
I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.
The basic principle is I command, and my employees carry it out immediately.