Mail-Merge

I love this job because I get to create exciting, interesting experiences for kids. Experiences they won't have at home or school or anywhere else. Experiences that will stay in their memories until they are old because they had never done anything like that before. I get to provide them with opportunities to learn something new, see something in a different light, grow their self confidence and have fun. At the same time I get to work with kids, I also get to work with staff, which, the older I get, the more I consider to be just older kids. Staff decide to work for camp because "sing songs, play games and work with kids" sounds like a really fun, easy job. Within the first hour of actually being responsible for kids, new staff have a look of complete bewilderment as they realize the job is not as easy as they'd expected. Fun yes, easy no. And with that realization comes the challenge of their life. But also, growth and learning and a completely life changing experience.

In my job, I oversee all of the growing and learning, sometimes guiding, sometimes cheer leading, but for the most part, just making sure that everything is running smoothly so that all of the campers and staff can be affected in the way camp is supposed to touch their lives. It's an incredible privilege to be part of that. In the off season, I work on all of the details of "running smoothly". It annoys me beyond words when people ask what I do during the other 9 months of the year. Do they think that I show up on the first day of camp and everything is just in place? Do they think that well-run programming happens spontaneously? The more effortless it looks, usually means A LOT Of effort went into creating it.

So it's the off season and I am busy working on the annual campaign to get money so we can operate, ordering camp store items, updating the website, planing programming for next summer, recruiting and hiring staff... the list goes on. I like having my fingerprints on every last detail of camp, and I know that I will be able to do my job even better during the summer because I have personally been involved with EVERY tiny thing about this camp, and in fact, have probably had a LONG conversation, exchanged emails with a Board member, gotten frustrated and vented to my best friend about most things that everyone will assume happened spontaneously. I'm not complaining, but I'm in awe of how much really goes in to everything. I know it will be worth it this summer as I watch campers laugh and have fun and as I watch the counselors literally grow before my eyes.

And I have to remind myself of that because the details are tedious and make me want to bang my head against a wall. Yesterday I had several, very long conversations throughout the day, with multiple people about mail-merge. Mail-merge is the process of taking a list of names and addresses and getting them into a mailing so that each person who opens the letter will see his or her own name and think, "wow, they care so much they wrote to me personally."

No one really thinks that though, because mail-merge is standard. "Standard" should not be confused with "easy" because it was not an easy process to go through. I think it's supposed to be, but we don't do anything the easy way here, and so it required me to spend many precious hours of my life talking about and agonizing over it. The Board President, who, in real life is the Vice President of a major investment banking corporation, and has two Secretaries to do all tedious mailing tasks, for some reason wants to be very involved with said mailing from yesterday. I appreciate his interest and I appreciate that he offered to have his secretary print all 2500 double sided copies in color at his office. That will save us an obscene amount of money. But he doesn't really know anything about sending a mailing of this size, nor does he know anything about printing, mail-merge or any of the things that he wanted to be involved with. And so he was making so much more work for us with each email and phone call. I eventually decided to bypass him and speak directly with his secretary and try to leave him out of some of the details, but even still, it was a ridiculous process for a letter most people will throw away.

This is not what I envisioned when I dreamed of a career in camping. I pictured much more kayaking in the sunshine and s'mores around a fire, and far less tedious office tasks...