Student Hunger Drive 2016

Today was Loading Day, the final day of the Quad Cities Student Hunger Drive. Yesterday, I packed up and staged the last of the donated food so it could be easily moved into the truck.

When the moving truck arrived, we quickly discovered a problem: the food we purchased from Hy-Vee had already been loaded into it, and that moving the truck a little bit caused the packaging on the pallets to burst and release individual cans all over the place. We had to very carefully open the door a tiny bit so we could grab some without stacks of partially torn open, individually sealed 12-packs falling and crushing us.

Once that was dealt with (by having a few people crawl in through the slightly open door and stack the packs correctly), we loaded locally collected boxes from the staging area into the truck.

Then we all drove to the River Bend Food Bank to unload. That went well; they fortunately had a port with a lower height so they could forklift the non-toppled pallet away without us having to rip up the packaging.

After they weighed our submissions, we learned that the school raised over 11,000 pounds (including the +2,000 bonus for winning the skit competition). That will provide several thousand meals.

Don't wear a "volunteer" shirt to a different event

Many months ago, I volunteered for a FIRST Tech Challenge robotics event. They gave me a T-shirt that says "FIRST" on the front.

Last week, I attended a cultural event at the Figge art museum. That morning, I happened to put on that shirt. At first, since none of the people I knew had arrived yet, I was standing alone. One person came up to me and asked where a certain room was. I had no idea, and I had no idea why she asked me.

Only later did I realize that my shirt said "VOLUNTEER" in large letters on the back.

Oops.