The Mailroom which floor to send mail to is decided by one lookup: the company directory book on your desk. Read the department printed under the recipient's name on the envelope, find that department in the book, and the floor heading it sits under is the floor you send to.
The Mailroom which floor to send mail to: the routing steps
- Inspect the envelope and read the recipient name and the department printed under it.
- Open the directory book on the desk.
- Find that department in the book and read the floor number from the heading of the page it appears on.
- Load the letter into a capsule.
- Send the capsule up the pneumatic tube for that floor.
If you cannot find the person or the department anywhere in the book, the letter does not exist for you and it is burned instead — that decision belongs to mail sorting rules. A frog consignment is routed the same way, only it has to be sealed in a container first: see frogs.
What the directory book contains
The book on the desk is the company directory, and it is a two-page spread you open with a prompt, page through with the arrow keys and close again. You can open it without picking it up off the table, which matters because you will be checking it constantly.
Its pages cover:
- The junk mail policy, the page that tells you what has to be burned.
- One page per floor, headed by the floor number and the department on it — Floor 1: Human Resources is the first of them, and it lists that floor's staff, names like Hon. Ahmad Haaning and Jamisha Juarez.
- Nothing about people who are not staff. If a name is not on a floor page, that name is not one you can deliver to.
That last point is why the book, and not the envelope, settles whether a letter is real. What to read off the envelope in the first place is covered in mail sorting rules.
The tubes at your desk
The pipes standing at your desk are numbered by floor, so the floor you just looked up tells you which pipe to feed. On your first day only two of them are connected, one for Floor 1 and one for Floor 2. Anything addressed above those floors has to wait for the tube network to grow, so check which pipes are live before you promise an upper floor its mail.
If the network grinds to a halt, the compressor is the part that has given up, and that is covered in furnace and machinery upkeep.
When the directory changes
The directory is not static. Names in it get crossed out the longer you play, so the book you started the day with stops being the book you end the day with. Read it fresh for each letter rather than trusting what you remember from earlier in the day.