What Can A Few Copies Cost?

As we move through Installation Season, I get to spend some time in the local area. Now you may think you know what local means, and I thought I did too before I started traveling as a Grand Officer, but I found out, completely by accident, that it is a fluid sort of definition. You see, a friend of mine here in San Jose wanted to throw a party at a winery and she asked me for some ideas. I instantly suggested Merryvale Winery in the Napa Valley. The cask room there is marvelous and they cater from Tra Vigne next door, which has great food. Their wines are great and the people are friendly. While I was explaining this, my friend interrupted me and said, "No, I want to do something local," and I stood there giving her a dumb deer-in-the-headlights stare because I couldn't understand what she was saying. It took me a full thirty seconds to comprehend finally that a two hour drive does not mean local to normal people. Trust me, when you are a Grand Officer, ANYTHING that you can go to and in the same day go home to sleep in your own bed is Local! If there is no hotel involved (and sleeping in your car does not count as no hotel), it is local. So since I was local this weekend, I decided to use Saturday to finish off an important task, the preparation of my Associate Conductress packets. When you are an Appointive Grand Officer, you write a letter to all your subordinate officers all over the state, telling them a bit about you and asking for information about them. Those letters go into packets that are given to the Deputies to deliver to all your subordinates in their district. So when I was Grand Warder, I wrote a letter and put together a little information sheet and the Deputies delivered those to all the Warders in all the Chapters in California. I also discovered that no one sends the information sheet back to you. Out of the 200 or so that went out, maybe I got fifty back, and they trickled in all year long. You ask them to send you a picture so you can recognize them when you visit in their local area, but no one sends you one. So you take along to the Official Visits a list of the names of the people you are looking for and try to look at name badges and ask around to find your officers, which can take a little while. Sometimes, if you know one person from a Chapter, you can ask them, "Who is your . . ." or "Do you know your Warder, Sister. . . " to try to track them down. Once you track them down, it is considered courteous to have a little token gift to give them, to thank them for serving their Chapter and to express your pleasure in meeting them. I gave out dove pins with a little flag when I was Grand Warder because the emblem of the Warder is the Dove and the fun emblem included a flag bandanna. One of my bestest buddies found them for me. When I was Grand Marshal, I made zipper pulls with an enamel and bead charm that I thought looked like a turtle, which was one of the fun emblems for 2009. But when you are a Grand Line Officer, you are going to be serving with the same people for four years and some of them are serving as a leader in their Chapter for the first time or haven't served in a long time and they can be nervous. Also, you really need to get to know them because you have a lot of work to do together. So they need a lot more substantial stuff than a token gift. Traditionally, you put together a packet for them that includes a more detailed letter, a more detailed questionnaire, a plea for a picture and any other items that you think might be helpful. The thing is that no one tells you what should go in the packet, so you sort of have to wing it. Your Advisor, the WGM who appointed you Grand Marshal, can give you samples of what she sent out, but because of the way the timing of this works, her stuff is four years old and you don't usually get to see the stuff in the more recent years unless you ask the line officers from your own Chapter if you can see what they got from their Grand Line Officers. So Step 1 becomes figuring out what to put in the packet. Step 2 is to get it all copied. Step 3 is to get it collated into envelopes and Step 4 is to label the envelopes so you can deliver the right packet to the right person at each of the 190 Chapters. I got through Step 1 pretty well after conversations with various friends and advisors, but I knew that I wanted to do something that was an old tradition, but in a new way. Years ago, in order to help your girls get familiar with the Constitution and Laws (C&L) and Instruction Book used in California, Grand Line Officers used to send out questions for the girls to answer by looking up the answers in the books. There is no possible way that I can, in any amount of instruction, teach my Associate Conductresses the answer to every single question they are going to have to deal with in the next three years. But if I teach them how to find the answers, then there is no question they can't handle. The problem is that our C&L is thick and not very well organized for finding answers. I sometimes have trouble and I have a professional skill at it. But the books are available on CD and the CD version can be searched. So I thought, why don't I just get copies of the CD made and I can give each of my ACs their own copy. The catch is that most of the services to do this are not in California anymore. I finally found a guy in Minnesota who would do them, but with shipping, they came to about $1.50 each. Not so bad, right, until you multiply by 200. You have the same sort of ouchie with the escort examples. One of the big jobs of the AC is to work with the Conductress to escort special members. There is a whole section of the Instruction Book on the rules for how to do the escorting and some of them can be pretty detailed. Often, the AC just follows along, but sometimes she has to do one thing while the Conductress does something else. So there are these example sheets that show how to do the escorting with different numbers of people on different sides of the room. The example sheets I have consist of 21 pages. My regular copy guy does black and white copies for 4.5 cents each and will go cheaper for big orders. When you multiply 21 sheets by 200 packets, I found out that it counts as a big order. Even though he went all the way down to 3.75 cents per page, which I am told is a fantastic price, it came to a pretty penny when all 200 sets were made. (That's 4200 copies for those of you who are mathematically inclined. You can figure the price and then add tax on top of that.) And that was just two of the twelve things I ended up putting in the packet. The other truly pesty thing was my letter because I wanted to put the first page on my pretty colored emblem letterhead paper and the other two pages on plain paper because color copies are 18 to 19 cents apiece. (You can guess how I learned that and I am told that that is a good price too. If you are in the San Jose area, I recommend San Jose Copy on E. Santa Clara.) I have also learned that many high speed copiers will not allow you to use paper out of one drawer for the first page and paper out of another drawer for the rest. You have to use a slower copier for that and the copies do not come out as nice or staple properly because the rollers treat the different thicknesses and slickness of the paper differently. So I had to copy all the first sheets and then the second and third sheets and then staple them together. That was when I discovered that I was out of staples for the regular sized staplers I own and all I had that was loaded was one of those teeny tiny staplers that go in those teeny tiny office supply kits. The itsy, bitsy staples are cute when you staple one letter together. I discovered that they are less cute 200 staples, and six reloads, later. Once all this stuff got copied and I was done stapling, I laid it all out on my dining room table, with 200 manila envelopes I bought at Office Max. It was then I discovered that the collating fairies have left this world for a better one because the next morning when I went in my dining room, the papers had not magically gotten into their envelopes, but were still just sitting there in my dining room, looking tall and forbidding. I truly dreaded the task of putting these twelve different items into each of 200 envelopes. Little did I know, however, that my rescue was at hand. Some friends who served with me in 2008 in the Peninsula area had offered to help if I needed anything and I let them know about the foreboding packet piles. They came to save me! It took six of us a bit over an hour to get all the packets stuffed. They were awesome! I could have spent the entire day to get this done and they came and swept in and swept out. I was actually a bit disappointed that we got done so fast because we started at 10:00 am and were done by 11:00 am with the stuffing and if we had gone a little later, I wanted to invite them to lunch. Perhaps I can do that another time. Now all that remains is the labeling and sorting into Districts. The other sticky wicket still to be faced is how I am going to get these packets where they need to be. It took three full boxes to hold them all and I fly to Southern California, where a lot of these packets are going. At almost forty pages a packet, they weigh a lot too. I can try to cut down to taking just the packets for the areas we are visiting each weekend, but even at that, I think that it is going to take me a whole extra suitcase to fly them down. Luckily I can pack all my clothes in just one monster suitcase so I don't have to pay extra for the packet case, but keeping it under fifty pounds might be challenging. I will let you know how that goes. Next week I have more "local" installations, my Chapter's Farewell meeting and I will tell you all about the Deputy's welcome I attended, a new tradition for me to see, but an old one in some areas.