Thanks goodness for interns.

After a day and a half of a particularly dreadful task, my intern Alex finally said no. See, I had decided that we would make, Do-It-Yourself-style, 4,000 raffle tickets for the Frugal Fe$tival instead of buying them (the first batch of 100 is at right). I was convinced buying them would be prohibitively expensive.

So I had Alex printing and then cutting thousands of little slips of numbered paper, which then needed to be paper clipped in order in sets of ten. Oh, and then there were the pink “marker tickets” to claim prizes that had to match.

That’s when Alex put his flip-flopped foot down.

“Are you sure we can’t buy raffle tickets?” he said.

“They are going to be really expensive,” I said.

“How expensive?”

“Like $50 or $60, although, actually, I didn’t check.”

His gave me the stink eye, then pulled out his computer and went to PartyCity.com.

“They are $10 for 2,000 double tickets,” he said.

We stopped cutting.

A day and a half was wasted, but at least we didn’t have to cut and match the rest of the 3,500 tickets.

Later we bought the raffle tickets at Party Land in Santa Monica with a coupon that Alex snagged, so our total came to $16.93 for 4,000 tickets.

“When I saw you were going to make me match the marker tickets to the raffle tickets, I was like, no,” Alex said.

For my part, I’ve re-learned the lesson to do my homework first. Assumptions, especially when it comes to price, can backfire. On the bright side, my scissor skills are as sharp as ever.

Tagged: on Thursday, July 23, 2009 · 8 Comments »