Sorta Good Time
Part of being a Girl Scout is getting to know Girl Scout cookies, and since the girls have chosen to join up with a newly formed homeschool GS troop down here, yesterday I volunteered to help with cookie sorting. Awesome niece Teresa volunteered (was begged) to go along so I’d have company for the drive and to navigate if I got lost. And she even brought delicious coffee to help me get going in the early morning.
It was a beautifully sunny, crisp day to be outside. The sorting happened in the back lot of an electrical company so lots of space and easily available forklift and pallet mover. Due to the industrial location, no actual Girl Scouts could be involved in the sorting process, which is too bad but understandable due to liability.
Also, they wouldn’t let Teresa and me drive the forklift. Due to “you don’t know how.”
Whatever…
Teresa and I have lots of ideas for how they could improve the process next year…which no one wants to hear…but we are ready to share if asked.
The semi with our load of cookies pulled up right at 10 a.m. as expected.
The pallets were piled above Teresa’s head, so well over 6 feet high. The taller folks were in high demand as they were called for help from stack to stack as we reshuffled the cookies into smaller stacks for easier counting and sorting.
The individual boxes of cookies hold 12 smaller boxes of GS cookies, which means some of the boxes are worth $60 on the open market. (Black market sales of Thin Mints…who knows the value?!) This means there are multiple counts of cookies at each step of the process.
First we de-stacked the pallets of cookies into smaller stacks of cookies for initial counting. Piles of 5 x 5 x 5 make for quick counts.
Then the human ants sorted the cookies into individual troop stacks, where each troop’s pile was counted by 3 separate counters.
Then the human chain loaded the cookies into troop vehicles, then we were free to go.
Teresa and I were on our way home from unloading the cookies at one of our troop leader’s homes by 12:19. We scooped up Yessa and headed to lunch at Publicity in self-congratulations for a job well done. Jeremy even made it back from fishing in time to join us.
A pleasant day well-spent. 
Click on the picture of our two troop leaders and me to make it bigger and you’ll see, I’m not even joking.
Now, go support a Girl Scout.
