An Excel-lent Few Days (Har Har Har)

Hola again, everyone! Coming live from the home of Goochland Days Festival, it’s Elder McMullin! As always, feel free to mail me any baked goods or a sombrero, and I will happily accept. But, without further ado, here we go!

Some of you may remember that I wrote an email not three days ago, and therefore are wondering how on earth I’m going to spawn another expertly crafted and Pulitzer-worthy document out of my laptop. The answer is I’m not. Really nothing of importance or of interest has happened in the past few days (besides getting almost banned from Wawa), so instead I would like to immerse all of you reading this into the magical world of office work. 

THE STUFF

Most of what we do here at “The Office” is fixing problems that we (at some point) probably caused. This includes a multitude of spreadsheets that constantly shatter, and it’s our job to put them back together again. Technically speaking, we aren’t even supposed to have any of them as Salt Lake doesn’t like custom reporting forms besides their clunker 2010 software, but thanks to the absolute madlad named Elder Wendell we now have this green abomination to deal with. It’s… better than calling every night to get KI reporting done, but it is a bit like those “deep ocean” National Geographic episodes: you don’t like what you do see, and wonder how much else is hidden in the dark. So far though, I did fix one glitch in it by making a box one cell bigger, so yeah. I think I earned my IT degree from that experience. 
       In addition, I have been editing ads to clickbait senior citizens and young adults to come to church. It’s been streamlined as of late with a set formula from best results, and let me tell ya: it's one of the most humorous processes I have seen. We get raw videos from companionships, then download it to our already-strained laptops. After opening CapCut (but the outdated version that is still free), we re-upload the video and then auto-generate captions. After that, we readjust all the sounds and add some background music before going full screen mode. You see, CapCut costs money to export, so we just plagiarize instead, as the Lord would have us do. After firing up the screen recorder we re-reupload the video, where it then must be trimmed again in Microsoft’s video software Clipchamp. After that whole shabang, we RE-RE-REUPLOAD it to Google so our friends can post it. Repeat that about 10 times, and you too can be like me. Going back to the music part, Elder Morgan and I are locked in eternal conflict. When we edit YSA ads, he wants to add emotional piano in the back, as it adds a sense of urgency and “spiritualism”. To me, it sounds like this 20 year old is telling you you might die if you don’t come to church. So, my bid is to use the (free) bestsellers on TikTok to draw the youths in with how cool we are. So far, no resolution has been made, and so my current solution is to do the above steps twice with both audio tracks and see which does better.

     THE PEOPLE

    The Adams and the Hawkes are pretty fantastic. First of all, they keep a fully loaded candy bowl by the transfer boards at all times, so you can always get a lil snack while your video reuploads for the first time or your hotspot has to turn off and on again. Secondly, they are the gossip hub of the mission. As long as I keep an ear out, I can always learn who is having housing problems and who has gotten in car crashes- which information is strangely useful. Plus, they are all just such gems to talk to and laugh with, and I love each and every one of them. Especially when they sometimes feed us.

THE INWARD FEELINGS

I’m still alive, and that’s about all I can say about my current emotional state.

THE OUTWARD APPEARANCE

We have to present to MLC every Sunday night, which consists of President, all the ZLs and STLs, and the assistants. Several of the elders I’ve talked to say it’s the most stressful part of the job, as you are at the mercy of the very best missionaries out there to approve your plans for the week. If good, you survive. If not, you get a Sparticus-style thumbs down and might wind up in Rapidan or Albemarle. Being the youngest member of the gang if my reckoning is correct, you would think I would crash and burn magnificently because I know absolutely nothing about the upper echelon of missionary work. However, the ZLs AND the STLs have commented that I seem like a natural, and that it feels like I've been doing this for months.

 ALL IN ALL

It's pretty great. I feel lonely and stressed a lot of the time, but things are getting done and I can be happy with that. I know that I can survive this and more, and that God is giving me strength to go through it. Without Him, I never would have dared to poke one line of code or opened someone else’s ad campaign. With him, not only am I editing, I am constructing, refining, and finding myself in all the fun. Don’t get me wrong, I am still way outside my comfort zone, but I thank God every day for helping to qualify the call, and not the other way around.

Even If I have no idea what =COUNTIFS(DataPage!$D:$D, B22, DataPage!$E:$E, ">="&TODAY()-WEEKDAY(TODAY(), 2)-(7*REGEXEXTRACT(J22,"\d")), DataPage!$E:$E, "<="&TODAY()-WEEKDAY(TODAY(), 2)-(7*(REGEXEXTRACT(J22,"\d")-1)), DataPage!$A:$A, "<>") Means.

From your favorite new Facebook Influencer, 

Elder McMullin

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