Iron - It's good for what ails you

Just to get it out of the way - No, seriously, do they bake crack directly into Pocky sticks? If it weren't for my awesome metabolism I would easily weigh 250 pounds by 5:00 this afternoon. God bless my mitochondria, each and every one.

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In addition to all my regular duties at the office, I get the special assignment of doing any bulk mailings that come out of our branch office. This entails all the printing, folding, stuffing, sealing, addressing, postaging, and carting-to-the-mailbox-ing of the items, which altogether can be very time consuming.

This week we had a special mailing of invitations that was going out to a few hundred people (or, 611 people to be exacting about it) and thus it fell to me to get them all completed in under two days, as the event is pretty soon and we're needing RSVPs. Which isn't necessarily impossible, but it takes a very concerted effort. And with the 346 other things that I also need to take care of during the day, a concerted effort can really only be maintained for about 37 seconds before the phone rings, or someone starts yelling about mortgage insurance directly into my ear. In other words: Outlook Not Good.

To top it all off, the printer of the invitations used some sort of Devil Paper Cutter to slice the invites up, because dear lord it was like handling shards of broken glass, trying to get these things into envelopes. Have you ever had a 80 lb weight piece of paper literally lodge itself into the skin on your hand? Because it happened 3 different times to me yesterday. We're not just talking paper cuts, we are talking paper gaping wounds. I'm not saying I hit, like, an artery or anything, but it was a fair bet that I could have passed for stigmata at certain points during the day.

In any case, I usually managed to keep the bloodflow on the invitations themselves down to a bare minimum, as we do not want people to get the wrong idea about our event due to iron-rich bodily fluids sprinkled liberally about the page. But a bit of splash-over is inevitable, particularly from the one big cut on the back of my right middle finger, which tended to gush whenever I attempted to pull open a new envelope.

Despite these hurdles, I managed to get them all out in under 3 days, just shy of my actual goal.

....

You thought that story was pointless, didn't you? Wait for it, I'm coming (very, very slowly) to the reason for it.

So it's pure folly to try and lick shut 611 envelopes by yourself. #1 it is crazy gross, #2 you will run out of saliva around the 90th one and be totally screwed, and #3 you will get a paper cut on your tongue and the pain will drive you to a multi-state killing spree road trip.

These are all hindsight bullet points, because that's totally what I tried to do right up to the 90th envelope.

Once I got back from said road trip (results: mixed, but cathartic. See: Fox, America's Most Wanted for additional insights), I explored alternate methods to sealants. First, the sponge, which turns out to be wholly ineffective. Maybe I just had a bad one, but to get it sufficiently wet enough to actually get the glue to work, I basically had to dip the envelope in a glass of water. Invitations that run and disintegrate before I get them to the mailbox are generally not effective.

Next, I acquired something called DabNSeal, which advertises "Good for gluing all paper products." This sounds like a ringing endorsement to me. And indeed, it worked like a charm, except for the fact that it haunts my dreams.

#1 it is in the most creepily phallic bottle I have ever seen outside of a Condoms-to-Go store. #2 it has an explanatory diagram of use on the back side that rivals biology text books in terms of sheer gross-out potential. Nevermind that it is showing how to apply glue to an envelope, I always come away with the same Where-babies-come-from-lecture feeling very reminiscent of 2nd grade. And #3 there is a anthropomorphized envelope on the front of the bottle, and it is the most disturbing inanimate object with eyes that I have seen since that Juicy Fruit commercial with the CPR dummy that came to life and tried to suck the gum out of that kid's face.

God, it is two years since that commercial came out and it's still the most whacked-out thing I've ever seen. Ugh.

So yeah, last night I totally had a nightmare that the envelope mascot came to life and was trying to kill me in my office with a bunch of huge sheets of razor sharp paper. And he had this crazy maniacal laugh and he could slide himself under locked doors, because he was paper-thin. Oh my God it was traumatizing.

Do you think I could claim Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from my company due to a bulk mailing? I need to consult me a PhD.