Volunteering Fun

Every year, companies work with United Way in a coordinated week of volunteering effort. Basically, it is a way to try to make a difference by getting a bunch of people to all focus their efforts in a set amount of time. I usually try to pitch in, because I think it's a worthy cause. Hell, I think it's a bunch of worthy causes, and doing my part in some way has always seemed like a good idea.

This year, my willingness to volunteer led to some unexpected laughs.

You see, this year I volunteered with an organization that has a big yearly yard sale. I think they might make some money off of the effort, but the general idea isn’t actually to be a fundraiser. Instead, the idea is to have a sale of affordable items for their constituents. To give you an idea of what they have in mind, they sell items of clothing for five bucks. I think they might make actually make some money from the process, but that’s almost incidental at that point. I thought that was pretty cool, and it seems like a clever way to serve the community while also helping to balance a budget a tiny bit.

As you can imagine, though, this effort takes a fair bit of work up front. You can’t just have people show up and have to rifle through bags and bags of donations; the logistics simply don’t work well that way. Instead, they set up tables and organize the clothing into general sections (men’s, boy’s, women’s, etc.). However, it  takes a non-zero number of hours to organize and lay things out nicely in that kind of a structure.

That’s where I come into the story. This year, I volunteered to help this organization set up for their yard sale. As it turns out, they needed a bunch of to fold clothes and lay them out on the afore-mentioned tables for a few hours.

Now, the fun part of this story is what happened after they gave us the basic orientation. They told us what they were after, showed us where we’d be working, pointed to the bags of un-folded, un-organized donations, and then left us to our own devices (we were all big boys and girls like that).

Me being me, I made a beeline for the empty table because I wanted a workspace. Sure, I could fold clothes on top of existing piles, but that seemed more difficult than it needed to be, and I wanted to make things as efficient as possible. It didn’t matter that that was the farthest table from where we’d gathered, or that the bag next to that table was unopened, I wanted the most efficient answer possible. Let’s just say that there were no others in the volunteer group that thought this way. I ended up sort of off on my own island, efficiency be damned.

To make things even more interesting, that set of bags turned out to be the petite women’s section. Yup, I had walked myself off to the corner to fold women’s clothing. Sure, I had a free table to make the folding easier, but this was hardly my forte. I can fold t-shirts and men’s clothing fairly well, but I have very little practical experience with women’s clothing other than doing laundry at home. Basically, I know how to fold any item that looks like the Mild Wife’s. Outside of that, it’s a crapshoot.

As the minutes went on, I actually found a bit of a rhythm, and I was proud of myself for actually being able to fold the clothing. Heck, I even felt like I had a decent sense of which items needed to be folded and which ones needed to be hung up (jackets don’t generally make as much sense to the eye when they’re folded). Of course, I also had to fight my inner Marie Kondo, because the other tables had simply made piles of clothes. I couldn’t just unilaterally make a new system on that one table, nor could I guarantee that whoever came after me would continue the folding system. In essence, I had to go with the flow for how I folded the clothes, even if I was willing to be a rebel about where I folded the clothes.

The kicker for the whole morning, though, was when I came across a top. It was like a halter top thing with those criss-cross strap things, but it looked to me like there was a second item tied to it. I’ve never come across anything like that before, and I couldn’t for the life of me tell whether it was one item or two, and whether I should try to separate them or not. I twisted it around in my hands for a few minutes trying to make sense of it, I kid you not.

Ultimately, I gave in and took it to one of the ladies in our volunteer group, figuring that I’d call in an expert. Much to my relief, she also looked at the pair/item quizzically. She hadn’t seen anything like it before either, and she reassured me that I was not failing at folding clothes because I didn’t understand this collection of fabric. She did, however, make an executive decision that all of it belonged together, so she handed back the entire thing to me to fold.

I don’t even remember what I did with that article at that point, I was too busy chuckling about the whole thing. I’m pretty sure I just folded it as a shirt and then try to fold the attached thing as a rectangle of sorts, but don’t quote me on that. Either way, I discovered that folding clothes can result in quite the laugh.