Last Friday, Saturday, and this Sunday, our church hosted a Parenting Conference. Dad was the conference manager, and Paul Lamey and Tim Keeter, both from our church, were the teachers. I was a Gopher. That is what our family calls someone that is just along to do whatever anyone wants them to do. “Go pher this,” “go pher that.” (we live in Alabama) Therefore, the name “gopher.” On Friday, we arrived early, and I just sat around, doing nothing, because there were already so many volunteers. On Saturday, however, we made up for that. The conference was to be put onto four cds: Session 1 – Part 1, Session 1 – Part 2, Session 2, and Session 3. These were to be put into a case the size of a DVD case, with two on each side. Rob Dorsett, who is in charge of stuff like that, enlisted Shawn, Vanya, Jeremy, and I to help with that. Since we had a decent amount of people there, our church had borrowed a 9+1 DVD/CD multi-rewrite tower from another church than enabled us to burn 8 CDs at once (one of the drives was dead), taking about 7:20 per round, and having a 55/60 success rate. We needed 220 disks, 55 copies of each of the 4 disks. When we arrived on Saturday, they had already burned the Friday sessions, which was half of that. We started working on the third as soon as it became available, and put it in the top drive, and 8 blank cds in the other slots. We also had to print labels on the CDs, which took quite a while, the label printer was rather slow. I did that a while, and then left Shawn and Vanya to watch it, and to take the finished ones out, and put more blank ones in, whenever it finished. I went back to Mr. Lamey’s office, where Rob was making up the covers for the DVD cases. We were working on it to, not the very last minute, but even after that. He had some problems with the software’s interaction with the printer, and so he had to switch to another program, and start from scratch. After that, he worked on that, would print it out, cut off the edges, stick one in it, and see if it was right, go back, make it better, try again, and again, and again. He finally got it right. We were actually working on it together, sort of. He wanted an outside view, and I would tell him if it was straight, or not, and try it out for him, get the printed sheet, etc. Plus, I was learning, and asking him questions about it, since that is what he does at work, and he was more than happy to teach me some stuff. Well, anyway, we finally finished it, and printed off a sheet, and made over fifty copies of it. Then came the hard part. We were in the coffee/copier/printer/supplies room, Rob, Jeremy, Shawn and I, with people coming and going to check on the status of the burner. Rob was cutting the edges off of the pages, which had to be gotten just right, with a tool designed specifically for that, Jeremy and I were putting them into the cases, and Shawn was stacking them in the corner, preparing them for the next CD. And, during all of that, Mr. Lamey kept preaching. and preaching. and preaching. We were back there, getting very worried, and anxious, because we were afraid that they would come out of the classes, and just breeze them all off, and we didnt even have any out yet. After Mr Lamey finally finished, we had maybe 15 minutes to make 55 copies of the CD (and the duplicator was getting overheated, and was messing up some of the disks), stick them in the cases, and take them all out there. When they finished the breakaway sessions, we had sixteen finished products. The entire time people were out there, socializing, we were still back in there, working to get the rest finished, and get them out there. As it turned out, we had nothing to worry about, they did not take them nearly as fast as we anticipated. Which kinda made us me feel bad, after all of that work we had done. We ended up having a total of only 4 disks failing. Out of 110.
