mmmm, Steak …. tastes like chicken?

Poor Super Youth Pastor is stuck in limbo as a mysterious enemy threatens him in the hospital. I’ll see if he might survive soon but today I want to get the Angel Food update out. This morning we did our pickup and had 55 total boxes ordered. It was more than a little cold but the work went quickly and we got back to the church just a bit behind my planned schedule. Expecting it might take us a few minutes longer because of the distance we had to drive for the pickup I had some people arrive and start setting up for us. Things were mostly setup when we arrived and we started unloading and getting things sorted.

I’m very glad that I had several people come last month because they were able to help show everyone how to sort things and I didn’t have to spend as much time training because of it. Some people came about 15 minutes early and were impatiently waiting for their order. I had intentionally left a couple of things undone until it was time to start because I wanted to focus on getting everything ready and not trying to help people who got there early. That causes confusion and makes for a setting where things aren’t ready on time. The check-in papers were left in my office until about 5 of 10 so the couple that came early had to wait 10 minutes. It might seem harsh but if you show up 15 minutes before a store opens they aren’t going to open the doors because they are working on making things ready for customers.

Generally everything went well except we had two people not show up. This time I was nice and called them to remind them about the pick-up. One thought it was from 12-1 and the other didn’t seem to remember but both came out right away. I reminded them about the pick-up time and that if they aren’t here their food will be donated. We did have one other problem. Apparently somehow we had a break down in the check-in/out process. We have a specific manner in which we are checking people in and out to triple check the order is properly filled, but one box got switched somehow and the error wasn’t caught at the checkout. Very frustrating so I’ll need to try and find some way to improve the process so this doesn’t happen again. Now I am trying to reach one of the customers who I believe was given a Steak pack instead of the chicken pack that they ordered so I can give another customer the steaks they ordered. Confusing? Yeah I think so too.

I did learn quite a bit. We have a bit of a bottle neck at the check-out, which is likely what caused the order to go by without getting checked. We added in the offer to pray with people and quite a few accepted, but that really slows down the line, so we need to streamline that. We didn’t have a huge order this time but in the future we need to keep things moving. I’m planning a side room with a small group of people to pray. I also added a place for people to write prayer requests on their form. I’m going to suggest that be added online too. The basic setup we had worked really well but there are a few things we need to do differently to help as our orders grow.

We also have a few things we want to do that will slow things down, like providing coffee and snacks, so we will need to really streamline other things as much as possible. I also need more volunteers. We had just enough today, but as things grow the people we had will have a very hard time keeping up.