150 and 9

 
Today was the 150th Anniversary of the Ludington Daily News where I work. The paper outdid themselves with a 10-section supplement (in addition to the regular daily paper) with each section covering a span of years. Here are the top halves of the covers of the 10 sections.



The bottom half of each had a different picture for each of the time periods covered. Inside were both local and national news of significance from that era, lots of historic pictures and a timeline of local events. It was a huge undertaking for a paper this size, and I think they did an awesome job.



What this meant for us in the mailroom is lots of work. We had to assemble the 10 sections into 4 packets, because there were also 3 ads that had to go in the paper. Those packets were made up ahead of time. Here are half of them, in high rises, all set out ready to go in the papers today.



Here's the line, with people keeping the insert bins filled, and the person closest to the camera fixing floor copies (ones the machine spits out with errors). Perhaps these pictures don't do the best job of showing you how this works, but I was happy to have someone take any pictures at all.



Here's what I do at the end. I'm the "lead bundler." The papers were so thick that we put them through the stacker in sets of 10. (We usually do 50). You can count the 10 papers in the stack I'm getting ready to plop the ones in my hand on top of.



Today, I took two sets of 10 and turned them into a huge stack of 20 (larger than the 50 papers are normally) to send them to the strapper and out the window.



Trust me, 10s come out really, really fast. Ester describes what we do as getting paid for having a gym membership. I kind of like that concept.

Anyway, we had one huge stacker jam, and one broken belt in the inserter machine (both of which which stop the line cold for a significant amount of time), and a bunch of small jams and stacker dumps. The smaller stops were to be expected with this big an edition. All in all, it took a long time, but it wasn't nearly the hassle we expected.

That said, we postponed the run we usually do in the afternoon till tomorrow morning because we were so whipped. That means Friday/Friday night is going to be even tougher than usual. But we'll deal with it.

So that's the 150. Oddly enough, it's also my 9th Blogoversary on My Quality Day. How's that for an interesting coincidence?

Ester and I accomplished a big project after I got home, too. More on that tomorrow. She has to leave in the morning (sad face).

	See 4th Blogoversary
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