Bit of Ivory

I haven’t been online since Friday, because I went home for the weekend and our dial-up went down. It’s not really their fault, I think it’s the phone company’s, but I was still without internet access all of Saturday and Sunday. I’m at work now, and I just barely finished catching up on all the e-mails I missed. Down with dial-up.

So on Saturday I did a shift at Deseret Book. For the first 2 hours I was on gift wrap/ imprint. The gift wrap part I’ve got covered. I used to be terrible at it, but I got better. Now I actually enjoy it. Anyway, gift wrap is a cinch, especially because there aren’t that many things to gift wrap this time of year. Imprinting, on the other hand, scares the heck out of me. Have any of you ever done any imprinting? Unfortunately, it’s a process very prone to human error. At least, with the machines we have at Deseret Book, it’s a process very prone to human error. We have a machine that’s completely manual. I’ve mispelled names, put the name on the back cover instead of the front, put the name too far over so that it’s on the margin of the leather and stamps too deep, accidentally moved my hand inbetween stamps and double-stamped, used gold foil on a silver-leafed book and vice versa, and just about every other imprinting mistake you could possibly make. It’s not so bad when I mess up $10 hymn books and $12 journals (unless I mess up 3 or four in a row, which I’ve been known to do); but I tend to make my biggest mistakes on $100 scriptures. I’m especially bad when I haven’t done it for a while. You’d think my manager would have learned his lesson and just not scheduled me, but he has this thing about every employee knowing how to do imprinting, so there it is. Besides, I *am* good at gift wrap, and the two go hand in hand.

Anyway, I was on imprint Saturday. The last time I did imprint was Christmas, when I messed up a Spanish Triple Combination (it includes the Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants, our 3 added books of scripture). We didn’t have anything to replace that one, so, in line with Murphy’s law, I had *really* messed up (I put the name on the back upper corner instead of the front lower one. Upside down, of course). So I was especially nervous to do any imprints Saturday. To my shock, amazement, and utter surprise, I did six imprints without messing up on a single one. And they were *all* expensive scriptures. Hooray for me!

I’m sure my luck won’t last, though.