The things we do for books

from Natasha, our Book Drive Guru:

As you might imagine, I hear a lot of crazy stories working on the book drive.  When people are collecting and dealing with massive numbers of books, it’s bound to get hairy from time to time.  This story takes the cake though.  I love it because it shows real creativity, quick thinking, the ability to mobilize, hard work, and commitment to an outcome.  It comes to you from Jeremiah Witt, one of the students who won the Schools for Schools trip last year through his efforts with the book drive:

“Hi Natasha,

Today we had the craziest day of our book drive. We were told we have a fire inspection of our school tomorrow, and that we had to get all the books out of the book room.
The only problem is that we had maybe 500 boxes in there!

We panicked, because we had no vehicles to take books out of the school, and all the recycling bins were full, and we basically had no way to accomplish it. We contemplated hiding books in all empty cabinets in the school, and taking bolts off of any lockers so we could hide books in there.

We made a WHOLE bunch of calls, and we ended up having a bunch of volunteers come to the school and taking the extra books that weren’t sendable to different charities who would accept them. We were also able to reorganize all the books that still need to be counted so that the room would pass the fire inspection.

Anyways, it’s been the most hectic day. I got to school at 7:15am to work on the books, and left at about 8:30pm. My team wanted me to pass this story along to you.

I truly hope things at the office aren’t as crazy as the day we had today.

- Jeremiah”