800 Envelopes

Since my office is having a few workshops, we decided to send out flyers to announce the dates. We have 2 separate organizations, one non-profit and the other one is the regular office. We printed labels from the non-profit database and everyone pitched in to stuff the envelopes. Two flyers were for the non-profit organization and two flyers were for our regular practice. Every staff member sat in the conference room to stuff and seal the envelopes. When I came in the next day, I saw all of the envelopes sitting on my desk. I guess no one wanted to make the long walk outside to put them in the mailbox. For once their laziness paid off. At 7:30am that day, my administrator called frantically. She was sound asleep and abruptly woke up with the thought that we could not use the non-profit mailing list to mail flyers from our regular practice. HIPAA Law says the two needed to be independent of each other. Now we had a real problem. The envelopes were already stamped and over $350 was at stake. My bookkeeper and I had the daunting task of prying open 800 envelopes, taking out the two flyers and resealing each one. It took four hours but we did it. We decided not to tell our director as she was leaving for vacation the next day and it would have upset her. We took one for the team.