You Want Us To What?......

A few weeks ago I and 6 other brave and trusting women agreed to work on a "bar code project" for the school district.  It would involve bar coding all the new math books and materials for the elementary and middle schools for the district.  How hard could that be, we figured?  The district has adopted a whole new math curriculum for all schools, but only the elementary and middle schools have books and/or materials...apparently the high schools are doing all their math online.  I can't wait to see how that pans out since there is no 1 to 1 ratio of students to computers!  But I digress.

What I and the other brave women did not know beforehand was that we would be unpacking, stacking, repacking and hauling 21 pallets full of boxes containing 12 binders for every single elementary teacher, boxes of manipulatives, boxes of abacuses (the irony of the reuse of this ancient device is not lost on me!), and teacher manuals.  We had to unpack all the binders, stack them in piles, remove the shrink wrap from the inserts for each binder, put the inserts into the binders (oh, and one of the inserts was in a completely different box than the binders they had to go into), bar code the binders, repack the binders, then repack them into boxes in a different order than they arrived in and stack them on pallets.  All of this was done in an unaircondtioned warehouse during the hottest week of the summer so far.  We worked at fever pace and were able to complete in one week what the district thought would take a minimum of two...only because we wanted it DONE and could not face another week of it.

These are the finished pallets for 3rd, 4th and 5th grades.  Double this for the pallets we finished for kindergarten, 1st and 2nd that were already picked up and delivered to the schools.  
Bar coding...not what we had anticipated!