It’s a great day to reflect on everything that goes right in life. Anytime works as well, but this last Friday the 13th was a humdinger.
It started out as the worst day for placemat deliveries so far this winter season. Snowy and cold, I drove over to Bill Crytzer’s BUD Transport to pick up placemats for delivery to three areas. As I started to move boxes from Bill’s trailer to our van, it struck me that something looked strange. Instead of our signature word search puzzle having a white background, it appeared with white lettering on a dark blue background. Strange!
Next I noticed some pictures within different ads were shown as picture negatives. On D&D Auto Salvage, the business name stood out but the rest of Dave’s ad was a blur, like gray on a darker gray background.
The worst was Dr. Katie Supik-Resick’s photo. If you can imagine picking up a family photo album and all it had were the negatives instead of prints, that’s what it looked like. Not even close to usable. In fact, the more I looked, all of the placemats were unusable except for the Cindy’s Place Special, a total of 5000 out of the 107,500 ordered.
Ouch!
I knew I had to do something or a lot of restaurants would run out of placemats before Friday night, let alone last until replacement mats could be ordered and printed. AND! I knew I had only about 2700 sheets of white 11×17 in the office that I could run through our Riso digital duplicator.
The next couple of hours was a blur!
- Print 1500 Butler area placemats for restaurants that were very low (Riso + paper + ink = blessings)
- Print 1000 FNS placemats
- Load ‘em up and hit the road. )Remember, this is the worst snowy day so far this winter <grin> – Chicora first, then looping down through Butler and Saxonburg)
- Head even further south to Xpedx Paper in Pittsburgh. Goal, to buy 10-20 boxes of paper so I could print more. (They didn’t have the brand I liked, so I bought five each of two other brands. Sometimes the Riso would balk if the paper was too flimsy and would jam a lot.)
- Drop off 800 of the FNS at Phillippi’s in Natrona Heights, saving the other 200 for whoever needed it most. (I would make calls later and end up leaving them on the shelf until Sunday.
- Arrive at Kittanning and tote ten fifty-pound boxes of paper into the office.
- Load up one master after another, printing about 8000 mats before the day was done.
- Crash for the night, knowing the roads would still be ‘kinda’ bad on Saturday while I was making deliveries.
What’s my point? Without some bad, we don’t appreciate the good enough.
- To the restaurant owners who gave me a little slack, thank you.
- To waitresses who poured me free cups of coffee for the road and gave words of encouragement, thank you.
- To God, who is above us all and behind it all, I appreciate Your sense of humor.
Excellent!
Best regards,
Carl
