11,976 Visors On The Wall...

The past week has been filled with the joy of cardboard...and the treasures that come in it.  A wholesale dealer I've worked with before was able to get me a deal on nice quality baseball hats and visors for our 2017 shoebox packing party and I purchased 12,000 visors and nearly 8,000 hats.

The first truck delivery came last Wednesday.  It was schedule to come sometime between noon and 5 pm.  My right-hand shoebox packer, Pam, and I decided to work on packing items left over from our September packing party into boxes.  We packed 44 of them before we finally got a call at 3:30pm that the truck would arrive in an hour.  Judging it would be too late to do any work on them at that hour, we parted ways and my husband and I went up to meet the truck and stash the 16 cartons in the storage container.

On Monday of this week I'd taken my sister to a doctor appointment and while in the office I got a text from my contact at the church office telling me a delivery had arrived unannounced.  I call my husband who agreed to go move those cartons also.  He ended up moving all but two of the 55 cartons of visors by himself--2000 pounds in all.

Three team members and I decided today would be the best day weather-wise to open some of those cartons, remove the hats from the inner boxes they are packed in, and work to consolidate and move them.  It was even better when we learned another delivery truck with the final shipment of hats was scheduled to come this afternoon between 12-4 pm.  The trucking company official who made the appointment promised they'd call an hour before delivery.

We got started around 10:30 this morning and it wasn't long before those cardboard boxes were flying.  We counted and repacked and hauled for hours...and still no call regarding the delivery.  Amanda and Christine had to leave mid-afternoon, but Pam and I kept wielding those box cutters, re-boxing hats, and breaking down unneeded cardboard.  Where in the world was that truck?

Finally, at almost 3:30 pm the truck arrived with no prior notice.  There was a catch when the driver wasn't able to move the second pallet from the back of the truck.  I was able to give him the hand truck we keep in the container to use to haul them to the lift gate manually.  Eventually he managed to get all 39 cartons dropped to the ground.

We could have stopped for the day but Pam just wouldn't quit wielding that knife...

So we kept sorting and moving through them until we had two-thirds of the cartons emptied.  Our energy flagged at 6:00 pm and we moved into clean-up mode--putting the rest of the cartons into the container and organizing those four extra cartons filled with discarded cardboard.  We're saving it to take to our homes later for future recycling pick-ups.

According to our calculations so far we're missing 7 hats and 24 visors.  So...that makes 11,976 visors on the wall...Believe me, we're counting.