No Longer a Trainee Missionary

Maree asked me in an email how being on my own is going and this was my answer. I decided you all might enjoy it.

On my own is taking a little time getting into full swing. I have had some computer ISP trouble and we pinned it down to our DSL modem beginning to die a slow death. Because of that I have been reluctant to take live phone calls as I HAVE to have access to the online data base (Kanisa) where all the knowledge documents with answers to questions are found. My Mission Leader Assistant (the one in Murietta who is visiting taught by Sophia's mother - not Sophia) says she is happy to wait too. I was going to switch TV to Dish TV today but called ATT about the modem and they talked me into going with their own fiber optic TV package and bundled a higher speed internet with it giving me a free new modem and $200 back after three months to do that. They also lowered my phone bill and must have put caller ID on because my first phone call was from Aimee and the phne announced in a voice that Aimee's charter was calling me. Wild! Anyway they will be out Monday afternoon to install all this so it will be next week before I probably take phone calls live.

In the mean time I have been picking up a couple of emails each evening to work on. The first two I picked up on Sunday night. Wrote out my replies and then had to email them to my MLA for her to review before they could be sent out. She was very impressed with them. They answered the questions correctly and were written well. Hey, 39 years of teaching grammar - I should be able to write. Anyway she said I could take other emails and after researching them at my leisure I can (if they have a phone number attached call the patron with the answer. This doesn't need her supervision as the finding of answers is the hard part of the job. She feels confident that I can actually find answers - and that is the big problem with new missionaries.
So last night I picked two more emails out. I do this at night because during the day there are hundreds of missionaries working and the emails get snapped up quickly. In fact according to the tracking numbers they got over 1000 yesterday alone and this doesn't count the phone calls which outnumber the emails.

When you pull up the email to work on it, it goes into a program called Clarify. The clarify screen shows the case number, name of the patron, email address, phone #, etc. and gives you a place to record the topic the request is on and guides you to the answer and and a place to compose the answer and send it. SO - when I opened the second email I had randomly chosen based on the subject line of the message I was floored to find it was from Kathy Burrow's mother Barbara Hammond in Indiana. You should know the Burrows. Kathy is a really good friend of mine since we travel in the same genealogy circles.

I had attended (in an Adobe Conference) a devotional last week where the speaker said as missionaries we would be guided to the patrons who needed us specifically to answer their questions. I think this was a case of that but to show me (not the patron) how that works. No matter what it was bizarre. I am going to call her (and the other patron from Canada that I picked up last night) this morning and discuss with them how to solve their problems. The church really wants us to make contact by phone as the satisfaction level of the patrons goes way up when they are contacted by phone. I get a bonus if I do that because I don't have to be reviewed by anyone right now if I call them back so it is a win - win for everyone.

So that is how it is going.