Church Service Mission

Mary Ellen and I have been serving a Church Service Mission since last September. Every Monday through Thursday (we needed three days to recover), we have spent the entire day in Salt Lake City. We both serve in the Curriculum Department on the 23rd and 24th floors of the Church Office Building. Besides publishing the Church Magazines and manuals, the Curriculum department is responsible for everything published in print that the Church has, including signs, bulletins on various church events, labels for the cannery, pass-along cards, etc.

Mary Ellen serves in the General Graphics area which deals with everything except the magazines. For the first several months, she spent her time trying to learn to use the computer, a Mac, and Quark, a high-level program for page layout. It was a particularly painful experience as computers are really greek to Mary Ellen. She would take a document, change the English text to whatever language the document was requested in, and reformat the new language to fit in the document and clean up the language specific requirements. The Church publishes in over 110 languages. Most documents are done in at least 50. So she may be working in Spanish (relatively easy), Russian (not too easy), or Urbu (miserably hard). Each language has different rules for the formats of dates and the placement of quotes (plus a few other things that I don't understand). Mary Ellen knew that she finally was catching on when she was working on a Russian document that "didn't look right". She said it looked "German" but displayed in the Russian alphabet. It turned out that she was right!

I work in the Technology Support area. I spent the first several months installing new iMacs. Since I had never worked with Macs before, I enjoyed learning how they work and how to set up 100+ machines. Unfortunately my supervisor learned that I knew a few other things about technology and so I have spent much of the last several months as a consultant and implementor of repositories (I worked on these at Penn State for many years but the Church is just starting with them), XML conversion, implementation of a new mail system, and several other things that I have had previous experience doing in my earlier careers, and which I enjoyed retiring from two years ago!

One of the benefits of working in the Curriculum department is monthly devotionals. We are able to hear a general authority speak to us the first Friday of every month. Also we have had a few special firesides in the evenings with both a general authority speaking and a catered dinner! They have been wonderful experiences. Another wonder benefit has been working next to the temple every day and walking through the grounds on Temple Square as they changed from Fall to Winter to Spring and Summer.