Cranking Out the Bucktail

The Bucktail is my combination trophy piece/albatross in the Order of the Arrow.  The printing of this annual newsletter is preceded by months of requesting content and receiving none followed by a few days of frantic assembly and finally printing.  I received no Chief’s report, not committee reports save one, and two chapter reports, making this year’s edition a shadow of the publication that once rivaled the New Yorker, in my youth, in my head.   These scant articles fit nicely onto two pages and became a wrapper for the stack of forms and notices we were sending our members which totaled 14 page faces.  These 14 page faces were to be sent to 800 people plus 50 spare copies netting 12000 page faces to be printed.  Our office printers go about 20 ppm for a total print time of 600 minutes minus any hiccups.  I had no intention of staying 10 hours late at work so I started producing copies on all six large printers on the second floor of my workplace.   I quickly lost three of these printers to various outstanding maintenance issues I didn’t have the tools to solve then leaving me with three printers each in different wings of my building.

As midnight rolled around and my eyes got heavy, I set myself a 20 minute alarm whereby I’d take a nap, then check on the printers, fix any issues, and check to see if anyone had popped back into work who might notice.  I finished around 8 AM after losing a few hours to two fuser replacements and stubbled home with roughly .72 good-sized trees worth of paper.  And some people have had the audacity to say I’ve quit Scouting.