PB-and-J

April and early May are the "Helping Hands in Action" volunteer period at my company, where there are several volunteer opportunities each week. As all the real work projects had been divided up when I was on maternity leave, my boss assigned me to be the team captain of our charity bowling team, and later of a PB&J contest.

While the bowling was fun, some of my teammates made a side bet (which of course went to charity) with the team in the next lane . . . and we lost. This was unacceptable to my co-workers. So when we were challenged to a peanut butter & jelly sandwich making contest - the sack lunches we made went to a homeless services organization - by another department, I should have realized the pressure I would be under as team captain.

I had our VP's asking me about our team name (which we did not need), matching t-shirts, and the event layout. My boss was emailing me from New York last week asking about our volunteer headcount, and I think he was about to fire me from my captain position yesterday when I did not know how many volunteers our rival had or the number of sandwiches they made. So I had to call several people throughout the company to get this critical competitor analysis.

Yesterday at work I met our cafeteria manager to scope out the event set up, and then came back to my computer and made this in PowerPoint:


When I got home last night, I was trying to show it to Cas who wasn't the least bit interested. He was only slightly amused when I explained to him that I was busy at work pondering such important issues as, "Should the PB spreader get their own bread or should I assign someone to pass out bread?" And as expected, the work flow was tweaked in production. But I'm thankful to say that we made 647 sack lunches, well surpassing the 500 made by the challenging department! Hopefully my next work task will be more substantial, though the contest was for a good cause.