St. Ignatius of Loyola had his daily examen for the Jesuits. If I were establishing a practice for Amplifier, it might be four questions: What do we do? What do we not do? What should we no longer do? What ought we start doing? The answers to these questions have changed a lot over the years at Amplifier. From the start we were sorting through these questions – the original idea was to connect content creators with service providers, and we quickly realized that we ought to do work in the physical space. move atoms not just bits, as Jef might say. So when I read the Domestic Mail Manual, I was like, “I think I’ve got a handle on this presort thing. We should mail Despair’s catalog.”

This whole episode is a big of a fever dream to me, so I’m pretty spotty on the specifics. We learned a lot of lessons with wide eyes and muttered expletives. Lessons I recall: address ink can smudge on glossy mailers. Depending on the imposition of the mailer, and how it enters the postal machine, you might need to tab that mailer. It turns out people had learned these things before us and there’s ways to address these and other considerations. We had bought a CASS-certifying, presort software that took the Despair mailing list, cleaned it up with Zip+4, requested clarification when suites/Apts numbers were missing, and sorted/grouped the addresses in the pre-sort fashion. Finally, it did all the needed paperwork for submitting pre-sort mailings to the USPS. We had bought a printer that would take these addressees from the software and print the addresses directly onto mailers. The solution we set up at Gibson was found wanting – printer jams and poor ink adhesion – we tried a conveyor to increase the dwell time before the mailers piled up on top of each other. I think we mounted a hair dryer to flash cure the ink. None of this was providing the needful. Jud called a guy, and we ended up in the showroom of the place where we had bought the printer after hours on a friday or saturday night using the floor models of their machines. I think we ended up printing on a label and applying the label to the mailer. I think we were sending 30,000 mailers. And we did it. Somehow, we decided to do it again the next year, and I think that count was 300K mailers. We definitely ejected prior to completion the second year and handed the job off to Texas Mailhouse.

What do we not do? We learned early on that we don’t do pre-sort catalogs, that’s for sure. We are not a mailhouse.