I scan old bingo cards at a church hall in Scranton and card #5000 finally made me admit this gig is not boring

Elliot Perez · 2026-09-15T06:35:04.889012+00:00

I started digitizing the bingo cards from St. Ann's hall two winters ago because the pastor said the old ones were getting wrecked and nobody wanted the job. For the first year and a half it felt like exactly what it sounds like. Sit in a back room with a flatbed scanner, feed in cards, name the files, go home smelling like paper dust. Last Thursday I hit card number 5,000 in the system and I just sat there for a second. Somewhere around the 3,000 mark I started noticing the little stuff, like one regular named Dolores who always circled her free space in pen, and a whole stack from 1987 where somebody wrote the winning numbers in the margin like a score. I can tell you which tables sit by the radiator because those cards are warped and yellowed, and which ones got replaced after the roof leak in 2019 because the corners are still crisp. The count itself is just a number but it hit me that I basically built a map of forty years of Tuesday nights in one hall. Does anybody else here keep a running count on a project and get weirdly emotional when it rolls over?

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I scan old bingo cards at a church hall in Scranton and card #5000 finally made me admit this gig is not boring | Boring But Cool Jobs - Pinecone Attack