Perfectly Positive

Lately, people have been using the phrase “a perfect storm” to describe an event where all the contributing factors are so negative that the final outcome is more disastrous than anyone could have predicted. I don’t know of a similar term for an event where everything snowballs positively; serendipitous, maybe, but that doesn’t fully capture the satisfaction of a win/win/WIN event. Whatever you want to call it, we’ve had one of those minor miracles in the church office this month.

We have been using a hodge-podge of methods to produce the printed communications for the church – everything from small laser-jet printers for flyers and posters to a large duplicating machine for The SPIRE and our weekly bulletins. The output from the color printers and copier was quite good but also quite expensive. The output from the duplicator was much more cost-effective, but of lower quality, and it couldn’t do full color. All of these documents also had to be separately folded and collated. The new church and Foundation Fund brochures had to be jobbed out to achieve the look and feel we wanted – and that’s not an option for our more mundane printing needs.

Last fall Norma had a brilliant idea. The lease on our duplicator was expiring in February; what if, instead of renewing it, we got a better deal on printing with our color copier? After a couple of meetings with vendor representatives, we agreed to trade in our existing duplicator for a much smaller one that will be primarily used for envelopes and the copier for a larger one that offers:

• Extremely high-quality reproduction
• Cost-effective color
• Banner capability
• Integrated printing of covers on different paper
• Hole punching, collating, folding, and stapling
• Network connectivity

(And that last item wouldn’t matter to me if John Szantho hadn’t just installed a new router in our office that will allow me to print wirelessly through the network. Thank you, John!!)

We will be getting all these advantages at a significantly lower price than the total cost of our previous patchwork printing solutions, and just in time to work on the programs for the Presbytery meeting we will host on March 29. From the viewpoint of your marketing person, this is way beyond serendipity; I am feeling absolutely blessed.

Maybe it’s odd to get so excited over a piece of office equipment, but think about it – don’t you pay more attention to printed materials that look as if they were professionally produced than to those that were apparently run off a mimeograph in someone’s basement? Isn’t your attention more likely to be grabbed by high-quality color graphics and photos than by black-and-white clip art? I’m not so much excited by the printer itself as by all the ways in which I can see it helping us to spread the word about First Presbyterian Church of Sun City.

~Beth Mabee