Love, As Always, Pete

The Weekly Letters, by A. Pedersen Wood

April 16, 1993

Dear Everyone:

Got your taxes in on time?  Good. 

Personally, I'm trying to find the time to take my refund down to the Credit Union so I can salt it away until the insurance on my car is due.  Lest you fall into the misconception that I am hopelessly well-organized, allow me to inform you that last week I went to buy a Get Well Card for Mother, who officially got home from the hospital yesterday.  By the time I got back to the car, I no longer had the little bag containing the card.  I have no idea what became of it.  I hope whoever finds it makes good use of it. 

So, I’ll go out and buy another card and (hopefully) this one will make it as far as the mailbox.  (Yes, “Richard” & “Marshall”, I put your names on it.) 

One reason why my brain has turned to tapioca is because of what's going on at work.  (Nothing is going on at home because I'm spending all of my time either at work, or working at home.  We haven't been to the movies since Point of Return.) 

What's going on at work is that we are continuing to plunge headlong into Destruction.  To be more specific:  My Destruction Approval Quality Improvement Team is racing to get the 1993 "Annual" Destruction Review out by next Tuesday, which is the official Launch Date. 

Each night we run as many reports as we possibly can, which is to say, exactly eight.  With approximately 100 reports to get out by Monday, we’re stretching CRMIS to the limit.  Not to mention driving the people who man the printers crazy.  Needless to say, we're a going through a lot of paper, in order (ultimately) to destroy a lot of paper. 

Each day, we stumble over yet another little problem.  Like yesterday:  What happened was that last week, Person A thought that Person B was going to do something that we needed done before certain of these reports can be run.  Person B thought that person A was going to do something else first.  With the result that nobody did anything, which we discovered yesterday morning when we found the Something sitting in a chair, where it has been snickering at us for about a week now. 

So, I went through the Something and prioritized what could be done and made up a solution for what couldn't be done and the Destruction Juggernaut kept barreling along…until it bumped into a printer that suddenly decided to ignore the instructions sent to it by CRMIS and started printing the reports in what's called "Quad" printing. 

"Quad" printing means "4 pages in 1".  It reduces each page of the report to one-half size and prints 2 pages on one sheet of paper.  Then it prints the next 2 pages of the report on the other side of the sheet of paper.  It's a great way to save on paper, especially if you're running very large reports. 

However, it means that the report appears in extremely teeny tiny printing, which is not conducive to getting people to respond to a request that at least some of them are tempted to toss as soon as they see it anyway.  We have someone looking into the persnickety printer problem. 

Next week, come hell or high water, we'll have a "Batching Party", in which all of the "volunteers" we can press into service will spend the day assembling all of these Batches, collecting them into groups according to Records Coordinator, and stuffing them into really BIG mailing envelopes and sending them out.  Then we'll all breathe a collective sigh of relief and go to three movies in a row. 

Love, as always, 

 

Pete

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