Temple Leadership and Global General Conference Training

Since Monday was the fifth Monday of the month, we didn't have our normal Mission Devotional. Our day was pretty low key. We have a busy month ahead so we stayed busy setting up events. Our Monday evening was a wonderful Family Home Evening. One of our brand new missionary couples gave the lesson. The Ipsons live in Utah; however, they actually come from Gresham. Sister Ipson looked so familiar to me, so when I found out they were originally from Oregon, I asked her if she ever worked at the Temple. Sure enough she did. I then asked if she ever substituted for the Tuesday evening shift and she said yes. She asked if I was the coordinator and I said yes. If was fun making that connection.

Tuesday was a very busy day. We had an event Tuesday morning that the Linfords covered. It was originally supposed to be Tieline only; however, our French SLC team and Sara from the Italian team came to the COB so we provided support. There had been a great deal of confusion about Tuesday morning. We were originally told it was Tieline only. They we were told French would be there. Then we were told French would come Tuesday night. Lastly we were told they be be there for Tuesday morning after all. In actuality, The French team were just as confused as we were. The French sister showed up at almost 8:30 thinking that was the call time. Call time was actually 8:00. Neither of the brethren were there. They thought it was Tuesday night. So after some quick calls the other two brethren showed up. One lives only a few minutes away. The other one arrived about 9:05 after the event started. Needless to say, everyone was frustrated and confused. The interesting thing is we had brought it up to the Supervisor and MLC on Monday because we were still confused. Elder Wilcox didn't know what meal he needed to put the French team on. We were assured they were coming Tuesday morning; however, the French team didn't get the same reassurance. We need to do a better job of communicating to our teams.

Elder Wilcox and I started with our Zone Devotional. We had an initial panic as no one could sign into the Zoom meeting. We weren't sure what was going on. I decided to see if it was the link or Zoom that was having the problem. I started a new meeting and sent the link to our Zone leader. He was able to get it so I immediately sent the link to everyone else in the Zone. We didn't get everyone, but we did get a little more than half of the people we usually get. The Merrills did the devotional. Elder Merrill was a Captain in the Marine Corps 
and shared how the Gospel helped him many times in his military career. After the event, we realized the Zone leaders Zoom link had expired. He sent me a new link and I updated SharePoint with the new link.

Throughout the day, I worked on our continual clean up of our systems. Later in the day we had our General Conference preparation meeting. We are on target to get everything done in time for General Conference. That evening we had the Tuesday evening session of the Worldwide Devotional for Young Adults, September 2022. We had about 4 different languages in SLC. The rest of the languages were Tieline. After we ate, they did mic checks and got ready for the event. About the same time, I got prepared to participate in the first session of the October 2022 General Conference Preparation (East) Teams meeting for the areas in the East. This meeting was put on by the Translation team and we were invited to participate. Eunlan gave a great presentation about Interpretation. We fielded lost of questions and it was a good meeting.

Wednesday we had our weekly Team meeting in the afternoon. Daniel brought up the problem we have with some of our Interpreters being unable to take the mandatory annual workforce training. I've been passing the information on to a person that was supposed to be working on the problem. A day or so before, I decided to take the problem to someone else. I have been sent back and forth between the Training team and the Global Services team. No one wanted to responsibility for the problem. Anyway, I finally got someone to actually help me. I had opened a ticket with 5 people on it in hopes more than one reporting the problem would get some attention. The tech that called me back and together we figured out what the problem was. Long story short, there are two active records for those who cannot take the course. He signed in as each of the 5 people and selected the account that had the courses assigned to it. He sent me a new link and had me have each of the 5 sign in and try it again. IT WORKED! Daniel said he gets hundreds of emails throughout the month of those who cannot take the course or those who no longer do work for us. He decided to turn that task over to Sara and me. I was happy to report that the problem is solved for those who could not take the courses. So now when he gets an email, he forwards it to me and I send it to the team who can reset the account so they can take the course. 

The second problem of people who no longer work for us presented a new problem. In the past when Daniel would send those to me, I was told to make sure they were inactive in Event Central, PLUNET and ITI. Most of the time they were already inactive in those systems. However, we found out with the previous problems for not taking the courses, that they are also in ANOTHER system that does not talk to any of our other systems. So now we have to make sure they are deactivated in another database. Sara and I had a meeting with our HR head and came up with a plan. Alan sent me a list of all the people in Daniel's downline. I compared it with our ITI list and sent back all those who are inactive in ITI so they can be deactivated in the HR/Training system. Hopefully, both of these things will drastically drop the number of emails Daniel gets from these two problems. 😊

Later that evening we had the last session of the Worldwide Devotional for Young Adults, September 2022. The Linfords covered that event. We actually went home early and had a relaxing evening. We went to bed early, as we had an event very early the next morning.

Thursday started with the 2022 Live Temple Leadership Seminar. We started at 5:00 am. The cafeteria doesn't open until 7:00 am so we had to go off campus for breakfast. Elder Wilcox and Elder Linford picked up breakfast and Sister Linford and I set up the area in the cafeteria so we could feed everyone. We had 42 people for breakfast. We had 11 languages. It was a lot of fun with so many people. Many of the teams we don't see that often. We got to watch most of the event. They had a panel discussion where they answered questions from the Temple leadership. Unfortunately, I missed the last part of the meeting and the talk by Elder Bednar because I had to participate in the second session of the October 2022 General Conference Preparation (West) Teams meeting for the areas in the West. This one was in the morning to accommodate that part of the world. It was a virtual duplicate of the other meeting. It went well. Again, Eunlan did a great job. A few of our team were able to answer questions via chat or actually online. Because of both events, we missed our Zone Devotional which was also at the same time! We were able to leave at 3:00 pm so we could go to the Temple. It was so nice to get away and bask in the Spirit of the Temple.

I spent much of Friday on video conference calls. Most were ad hoc calls to tackle specific things that have come up all week. I think we accomplished a lot of work and made good progress. Unfortunately I didn't get all the physical work done during the day so I had to postpone it until Saturday. As much as I hoped to leave early, we didn't get out until after 5.

Saturday, I worked all day. It was nice that I didn't have all the interruptions I get throughout each day. By 6:00 pm I had finished everything left over from the week. I even put in a little time on HawkSoft. Sara chatted me later in the evening to let me know she added more people to our GC Conference Preparation meeting that we are holding on Saturday, September 10th for all our Interpreters. We are getting a great response and expect to have about 100 people in person and nearly that many on Zoom. We will be holding two session on Saturday. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. Anyway, I had spent much of the day adding the people to our PLUNET order. I told her I would take care of the new ones on Monday. I needed the evening off. We watched Harry Potter #2 Saturday night. We will finish the series this week (I hope.)

Sunday was a good day at Church. We missed Music and the Spoken Word. Well go again next week. We didn't have our monthly Break the Fast dinner at the apartment because we are having a Labor Day Bar-B-Que on Monday. We started a new Sunday School class. This one is taught by a member of our Mission Presidency. We decided to check it out. We loved it!

I hope you have a GREAT week!

Love, 

Mom and Dad

Grandma and Grandpa

Steve and Leslee

Elder and Sister Wilcox