I May Have Rallied Our Mission Leadership To Commit White Collar Crime

Howdy again everyone! Reporting live from the overheating laptop that now runs the mission (or so it seems), it's Elder McMullin! As always, feel free to send me any microwave potatoes or a new motherboard, and I will happily accept. But, without further ado, here we go! Quick plug as well- everyone should renew your subscriptions soon because we are OFFICIALLY A YEAR IN! Thank you all for the support I've felt through the hardest and most rewarding year of my life. Your prayers, emails, letters, or even just smiles that I know happen brighten my day, every day. Thanks for reading these chunky boys every week, and thanks for sticking with Elder McMullin!

Well, the biggest news of the week was transfers! Unfortunately, Elder Morgan had to go on his merry way, but after 5 transfers in the office he seemed pretty ready to go. It was admittedly a painful death for him though, as he's going into his last transfer and had to leave a position he loved. However, after one last misty-eyed glance at the KI reporting form and a final patch of our local AI that pings every companionship every day about referrals once again, and he logged out of the system he worked so hard to build.
     AND THEN CAME ELDER MCMULLIN TO BREAK IT ALL OPEN AGAIN! It feels freeing to be in control again (reminiscent of the NC days of iron-fisted leadership), and this time in a job that people actually care about. True, the care is mostly because if they don't go through us then they can't do missionary work, but still. It feels nice to be important. It was a doozy of week to start poor Elder Miller into though, as we learned the hard way that the Mechanicsville zone would be a bit like Esau and Jacob: quite the difficult delivery and even more difficult to upkeep. Elder Morgan and I did a lot of frontal work to try and make it make sense, but we learned today that most of what we did was... superficial. Yes, the PowerPoints all looked nice and there was a sparkly new folder in the VRM drive to make it an even 10 zones, but they all decided to stop working today at noon. Elder Miller and I gallantly broke into the office as the messages start coming in about Mechanicsville not being able to report KIs, and whatever they do report (after our patch job) isn't showing up. This leads Elder McMullin to sacrifice his P-study block like a red heifer to figure out what the blazes is going on here. Time continues to tick as I go deeper and deeper into the sheet monster, uncovering new layers of formulas and equations like some sort of Bill Gates-themed onion. A little bit of crying, three Copilot searches, and some heartfelt prayer later though, and I managed to find the single line of text that needed to be added. I tell ya, it was like a symphony as my laptop fan kicked on and rows of numbers started falling into place. Do I have any idea why? No. Am I going to claim that I know what I did? Absolutely. 
        Besides that, we've had 3 sim problems, a Preach My Gospel app that lived 2 hours in the past, and some missionaries that had no ward to call home for about four hours. All of them are in various stages of completion, and I am the happiest I have been for quite some time as the new man behind the curtain making the miracle of Oz come to life. 
     To explain the title line, we had quite the presentation at MLC. You see, we really have no idea why we're invited, as the whole meeting is centered around the idea of "pull 40% of the KIs of the mission or you are a failure". Seeing as we have a buns area and mostly fix others' problems, we most definitely don't pull that kind of weight. Plus, we don't run a zone, so the 3 hours dedicated to explaining how we should run Zone meetings and Zone activities and Zone accountability falls on deaf ears. But, by the grace of President Hutchison, we do get a 10 minute powerpoint at the very beginning to go over referrals. Lately, they've been a copy-paste formula of the same slides over and over again, but it was not to be this time. As the projector coughed to life, the audience of the best missionaries on this side of the Mississippi and a well seasoned Mission president were greeted with the title slide "How to Get Away with HOT Zones". Full steam ahead we go into our entirely crime-themed presentation about how we need to steal back our funding for online ads, and find our own means, motive, and opportunity for doing so. It was bold. It was loud. We got some laughs in the admittedly confounded audience. And President himself thanked us for, and I quote "a creative take on a subject that can be a little dry". I don't know if we overstepped the line a little bit, using Mosaic quotes about the law of Retribution to justify our slides on robbery, but almost every ZL admitted is was their favorite training from the SMLs, ever. And if that is the only legacy I get to leave before either being banished or exalted (because those are really the only options after that hot number), then I can die a happy elder with my neon orange slide deck.
    Anyways, I hope y'all have a great week, and I'll talk to you again next week!

From your favorite Privateering powerpointer, 

Elder McMullin

Photos!
1: Richmond but better this time!
2: The most 'hood Gayton gets
3: I fixeded it
4: My calling card to Rob SLC dry
5: The one gift from Elder Morgan I got: his RockJam keyboard with 3 volume settings and absolutely useless synth function.




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