While I was unemployed I sorted food at the food bank twice a week. I figured if I couldn't do anything cool in engineering, I might as well to something useful in nonprofit, and there are few things that I value more than food. Ergo, food bank.
Anyway my volunteer shift starts at noon, but I generally arrive about five minutes after just because I'm always running late. Anyway I like that by the time I arrive the initial confusion of "What the hell are we doing today?" has settled down, people have generally figured out duties, and all I have to do is a four-second assay of where I'd fit in, and jump in and get to work.
However, today I arrived, and people were *still* mulling about looking confused. There were stacks of boxes of cans on pallets everywhere, so I deduced that we were sorting cans from the canned food drives today.
There are two types of sorts of cans, depending on the recipients of said cans:
Type I (my designation)-- Some days, we sort the cans to ensure that a few reasonably balanced meals go in each box, to go directly to individual homes. So, a few cans of soup, a few cans of veggies, a few cans of fruit, and so on.
Type II--On other days, we sort the cans that go to special programs, and these boxes are packed homogeneously. So, all beans in one box, all soups in one box, all veggies in one box, etc.
Today I arrived and found that they had the volunteers unpacking boxes that had been packed by Type I and repacking them by Type II. It turns out that a mistake had been made by the volunteers from the previous shift, so we had to correct it. So we spent the first forty minutes repacking cans.
Then when we were finished, we looked up to see what our next task was to be. Forklifts brought in some bins filled with cans from canned food drives. And we were told to sort the cans by Type I methodology. Could they have just taken the first boxes... I mean... you know?!?
And this didn't bother anyone else. They just followed orders.
