Post 7

Ugh, those dang TMs think that they are covering all of their bases with their google drive, but let’s be real, that drive is still a mess. It’s such a pain to figure out what needs to be done and how to do it and when to do it and there is next to no true recordkeeping! Even the passwords doc is somewhat out of date and half of those accounts aren’t even used anymore!

The ones that are used are barely updated. Take for example the GMTC Wordpress blog page. I had to update it for the TMs this year and while it was easy enough to change out the TM names and grad years, if I had wanted to make any true changes to the site such as adding a page or altering the layout of a page of the site, I would have had no idea how! Nowhere in the GMTC Google Drive have any past TMs left instructions for how to work the website, instead they left it all on my very stressed out shoulders to figure out and to remedy their past mistakes. Now I have to go make an instructional guide for that for future TMs!

And don’t even get me started on the merchandise sales this year! First of all, in every contest that I have participated in, the merch has been ran a completely different way. Sure, it always works out and I’m always able to get the tshirts that I want, but it’s so frustrating to have to learn how to order from a completely different site each year!

Besides just ordering from the merch shop though, this year I was in charge of CREATING the merch shop and that was a whole different ballpark of frustrations! Because there has been absolutely no continuity over the years with how the merch shop has happened, that also means there is absolutely ZERO guidance for how to set it up or manage it or earn money or what items to sell!

It took me TEN HOURS to make all the merch shop items, if not more! I had to choose what company to use to create and sell the items, and then had to figure out what items to sell and what designs to put on them and how much everything should sell for. I hope everyone likes what I chose, but I have no way of knowing unless people give their feedback in the Discord or via email! Please help me help future TMs since they won’t do it for themselves. But like, do people want mugs? Do they want water bottles? Or did I just design those for nothing? AGH!

It was such a pain trying to keep track of what designs I had designed and if I had included enough variety in the colors and the sizing but not too much variety because what if someone wanted a red long sleeve shirt but I only had red short sleeves! I still don’t even know if I included the right Goldilocks level of merch.

Besides just THOSE struggles though (as if they weren’t frustrating and bad enough), I also had to make a whole OTHER merch shop because the original one didn’t offer stickers and I KNOW people want stickers! So there I had to go, again, making yet another account and figuring out yet another platform, because I care about trivia, ok?? Trivia loves me and I wanted to return the favor, so there I went. More merch designs. More struggling to precisely position itty bitty graphics. But hey, it worked out nicely!

Just ONE issue left. TM Shirts. Y’know, those super essential things. Neither of the merch shops I had already worked with and built a store on were going to work for the TM shirts. So what did I have to do?? Go look for yet ANOTHER site that I could build and order a custom shirt off of. So there went a few more hours! It was just one thing after another after another.

I’m glad it all worked out and I was happy to help the trivia cause, but those dang TMs need to get it together because oh. my. goodness. that was a headache!

P.S. My pride and joy of the merch shop is the onesie, please go admire it if you haven’t already!