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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