This week went a little better - here's what I was doing:

• Working with envelopes and papers (on Monday and Tuesday). This included:
  • Putting labels on envelopes. Each label listed a district and the number associated with it. There were three sets of envelopes that had to be done per district (222 in total).
  • Tri-folding papers and placing them in the envelopes after they were labeled.
  • Binding each set of three envelopes with a rubber band.
  • Making sure each district had a ballot box key, which was put inside a small yellow envelope big enough to hold it, and grouped with the rubber-banded envelopes. Quite a few needed their yellow envelopes retyped (I tore up the old ones to avoid accidentally using them if I lost track of anything), which was a bit difficult to do as the typewriter would either smear the text near the top of the envelope, or throw the envelope off-balance when pressing the Enter/Return key. I also ran out of correction tape and had a lot of trouble getting it (and the typewriter ribbon case, which connects to the correction tape's case) back into the typewriter properly, because it wouldn't advance the tape when I typed. One of the office workers helped me get this fixed (turns out one thing I needed to do when reinserting the ribbon and tape wasn't listed on the directions), though the top portions of letters that are tall ("b", "d", "f", etc.) kept getting cut off. I solved this problem by taking one of the torn-up yellow envelopes and placing it between the ribbon case and the metal part that holds it in place - it brought the ribbon up enough so the letters wouldn't get cut off anymore.
• Using the mask puncher - this was used for punching holes in the masks for the punch-card booths (from Wednesday to Friday). It's about the only thing I actually hate to use there, as it's very old (there's a lot of gold-colored shavings on parts of it - it's from the brass that's worn off from the roller rubbing against two metal bars above it), and I have a lot of trouble getting it to work when having to punch a lot of holes at the same time. At one point, I ended up actually bending back one of the metal bars (which holds the roller down) enough to prevent it from working (the bars are fairly thick, too), and had to hold off doing more work on it until the day after, when one of the maintenance people fixed that bent bar by straightening it out in a vice. It also seems I'm the first person in the courthouse to do this, and (by their comments) apparently am stronger than I look...But maybe it's because (given how difficult it is to punch some cards with that thing) I put a good bit of my body weight into pushing down the lever sometimes =P
• Typing my boss's name and title, stamping her signature, and using an embosser with the county's seal on it for watcher's certificates (from Wednesday to Thursday). This took awhile to do (my right hand was sore from embossing all of those certificates - its lever is far more uncomfortable than the mask puncher's), but I couldn't do anything else on Wednesday, when I broke the mask puncher.
• I finished up the mask punching on Friday - it turns out that one side of the puncher wasn't lifting up when the lever was lifted, which probably contributed to the bent bar. The rollers (and other parts) had some WD-40 sprayed on them, which made it a lot easier to use. I didn't have to throw my body weight into pushing down the lever anymore, just to punch a lot of holes in a few of the cards =P
• On Friday afternoon, I started working on copying specimen ballots. Each piece of paper has two pages of the ballot, and when copying them, they have to be split on separate pages (using one of the copier's functions to do so).

I also got my first paycheck of the year this week, too =)