The Mailroom how to keep the furnace lit comes down to one habit: the mail you burn is the mail that feeds it. A shift where you throw nothing in leaves it cold, so keep feeding the furnace with the junk the policy rejects. The other half of keeping the basement running is the compressor: while it is down, nothing you send upstairs actually arrives.
What goes into the furnace
The furnace takes everything the junk mail policy rejects, which means your fuel and your sorting decision are the same decision:
- Mail addressed to a department or a person that does not exist.
- Mail that looks like an advertisement.
- Mail from companies selling their services or goods.
- Mail from government agencies, including tax collectors and law enforcement.
- Mail from bill collectors and collection agencies.
Bills are fuel as well, and burning the paper is part of the job description rather than a trick. The full policy and the desk checks are in mail sorting rules.
Two things stay out of the furnace. Real mail belongs in a capsule, because the wall tally of green checkmarks and red X's is tracking your sorting accuracy, and a letter that should have been delivered will be counted against you. And toilet paper catching fire in the furnace is a glitch rather than something you are meant to do.
The Mailroom how to keep the furnace lit: reading the heat gauge
- Walk up to the furnace and read the status line.
- Check the heat readout, which shows a label such as Hot AF with a numeric value next to it.
- If it has dropped, feed it the next batch of junk straight away.
- Repeat as the pile on your desk grows.
The furnace reports its own condition, so you can tell at a glance whether it needs feeding before the next batch goes in instead of waiting until it has gone cold. The rule is simple: burn the junk as it arrives, and the furnace stays lit on its own.
The gauge is also how you catch a mistake. If a letter you were supposed to deliver went into the fire, the tally takes the hit, and that is exactly what separates a good shift from a sloppy one — see employee of the month.
Keeping the compressor running
The shop floor equipment is cursed and falls into disrepair, so part of the job is keeping it working:
- Watch for the compressor dying mid-shift.
- Restart it, and repair broken machinery, using the tools and the occult artifacts around the bench.
- Check the tubes are moving again before you load a capsule.
The pneumatic tube network is what carries the capsules you send upstairs, so a stopped compressor is a real failure rather than a one-off nuisance. The logic behind the whole job is that the mail has to keep moving: keep the mail and the blood flowing with magical artifacts and ancient tools, and if the mail stops, your heart might just be next. Leaving the equipment broken is what stops the mail.
Once the tubes are running again, the floor for each capsule comes from the directory book — which floor to send mail to.