<p><img src="http://www.braino.org/blog/images/packingcenter.jpg" height="240" width="160" align="right" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="" title="" longdesc="" />My brother and I joined a group from church to volunteer at the Charlotte processing center of <a href="http://www.samaritanspurse.org/index.asp?section=Operation+Christmas+Child">Operation Christmas Child</a>. As we drove up we saw cars everywhere. There had to be more than 300 cars in the parking lot  and parked along the road leading to the center. Hundreds of people were working inside the warehouse. Considering that it was the first night there for at least half of the people in the building, the smoothness with which everything went was amazing. They had a good system for quickly training the volunteers.</p>

<p>I worked on the taping line. Just fun, I pretended to manage it and made sure that the boxes flowed smoothly. I would guess that I touched more that 1,200 shoeboxs in the two hours I was working. Just for posterity&#8217;s sake, for anyone who happens to working on the taping line in the future, here is what I learned.</p>

<ul>
    <li>Keep the middle space clear of boxes. When passing boxes down the line to be taped, push them into the space between adjacent tape machines, keeping the center clear. When someone is done taping a box they can set it down in the center, and slide it straight down to the packers.</li>
    <li>Don&#8217;t drop the shoebox horizontally down past the cuter when you have wrapped the tape around it. If you do, the tape will spring back and tangle up. Drop it down at a little bit of an angle, and the tape stays laid out, ready for the next box.</li>
    <li>The front two people taping need to keep their eyes open and pass untaped boxes down to the others if needed.</li>
</ul>

<p>Working there was a blast. I&#8217;ll want to do it again.</p>