Converting the seasonal letter for the Fellow of FSFE to snailmailable format

Every year FSFE is sending a letter with seasonal greetings and a summary of the FSFE's activites to all Fellows. No – not by mail but by snail mail. For folding, bagging and sorting some hundreds of letters is an annoying job, the Düsseldorf Fellowship is usually meeting for Coffee, cookies and – that job. So the usual invitation was sent by email to Düsseldorf Fellowship:
Sorry, only available in German. Untranslatable.

Tach zusammen!

Wie jedes Jahr schickt die FSFE an alle Fellows am Jahresende
saisonale Gruesse mit einer Zusammenfassung der Aktivitaeten
des Jahres. Auch dieses Jahr wird das hier im Buero in DUS
gedruckt und kopiert und gefaltet und eingetuetet.

Das ist alleine ein saubloeder Job. Mit vielen Leuten macht
das Spass und geht ruckzuck.

Deshalb moechte ich am Sonntag ab 14:00 zu Kaffee, Kuchen und
Briefe falten ins FSFE-Buero einladen.

Es ist zwar nicht 100% sicher, dass die Briefe bis dahin fertig
sind, aber sollte das nicht der Fall sein, haben wir eben Kaffee
und Kuchen und keine Briefe zum Falten. ;-)))

Freiwillige Kuchentester moegen sich bitte melden, damit
die Versorgungslage angepasst werden kann. (Nebenbei: Yalla
droht schon mit den legendaeren, selbstgebackenen Plaetzchen
von Kerstin. Vielleicht kann Anja nochmal in Inges Vorrat
schielen...?)

Saisonale Gruesse

Rainer,
den Schoko-Nikolaus jetzt endlich verspeisend...

9 people showed up. The office was kind of hm... "overcrowded". The usual suspects heroes were (unordered):

• Mechtilde
• Frosch
• Yalla
• Byte
• DocKane
• Mikeadvo
• Rainer_work
• Mario
• Kerstin

After having finished the coffee distribution, we've been ready to start. We had a lot of fun.

We had to much Cookies and cakes – but it was necessary to buy more coffee. On sunday!

That was the view through the shop window. Some pedestrians stopped and looked quite astonished.

Later we ran out of envelopes. No problem – Düsseldorf-Bilk is really genious. I went to a Kiosk and asked for 2 bags coffee and 500 envelopes DIN C6 lang with address window. The lady even didn't twitch. She brought it. On a sunday!

Side notes

We have been astonished how many fellows we know all over Europe. So we have been able to sort out letters to fellows which moved without changing their data in the fsfe.org database – beside others the coordinator of the FTF and the coordinator of the Fellowship.

Another Fellow did change the address and included in the address field the text: "Das war die Änderung, die ich Euch mitteilen wollte. Strasse hat sich geändert, PLZ bleibt gleich." (.en: "These are the changes I want to inform you about. Postal code will remain, only the street has changed.") OK, no problem. The letter left the office with that text in the address field.

The usual average fellow is obviously not able to operate a Philipps Senseo coffee machine for there is no manpage existing. All attendees learned after spitting out the first mouthful of what they thought to be "coffee" that it might be useful to install coffee pads before starting the process.

The productivity went significantly lower when Michael presented a book produced in 1986: "Bulletin board systems guide". Most of the attendees have been operating such a "Mailbox" in the eighties or have been users. It took a while until the folding system was up again.

Besides there has been an exchange of more or less funny stories about smuggling cigarettes during being on duty for the army – and using army equipment for smoother smuggling.

DocKane showed up by chance. He only wanted to visit the office. He had no chance: He stayed and helped.

We felt 30% women to be an astoshingly high rate.

We all laughed about a letter which is fixed at the office wall. It's an official letter (no fake!) from a ministry. It informs the PRnik of FSFE that an email which was sent to him was forwarded to another ministry. By snail mail, not by email. The topic was: "Chances and risks of information society."