CAN we do it? Yes we CAN!

As mentioned in previous posts I'm on the Charitable Giving Committee here at work. Our latest project was called "Art for Hunger" and our objective was to create something out of canned food, and the food would then be donated to United Way's food bank. Being on the committee I was assigned to be in charge of the project for my department. If we can have an honest moment, I wasn't too excited about this 'cause I'm not exactly the most creative person on the planet, and I wasn't a fan of the whole project resting on my shoulders when I couldn't guarantee a good result. But hey, it's for a good cause.

Thus began the brainstorming. What the fuddilymudd do you make out of cans?! I had not a clue. One of our agents came up with the idea to make a big ol' tetris board. It was a noble and sensible idea, so I was on board (pun intended). Plus I didn't have anything better and didn't want to devote any additional time to thinking of a new idea. So we ran with it. A coworker and I went to the store to find cans with labels that had the colors that we needed while another coworker estimated how many we would need of each color.

The company gave each team $400 to buy cans with, and with that I was still concerned that we weren't going to have enough money to get all the cans we would need for our canstruction, as we had decided to do it 10 cans wide, 20 cans tall and 2 cans deep. We had gone to Walmart, and absolutely cleaned them out of various types of canned food and figured that we were probably 10-15 dollars over, but were fairly confident that we would be fine. Lo and behold we were SO GOOD that we have about $80 left over! I would like to say I acted like a responsible adult, but I screamed like a little girl. I was overjoyed, yes indeed. So we decided to stop at Maceys on the way back to work to pick up some cans we were lacking (as we had taken all Walmart had available and still needed more) and get some peanut butter 'cause although it wouldn't be able to be used in our structure we knew the food bank could use some serious PB.

Once we had all the cans we needed (and the peanut butter we didn't) we checked out. The total came to $80 and some change. I got excited and turned to Amy, said coworker, and said "We used all our money!" and the cashier was a bit shocked and asked "You want to use all your money?!" In this case, yes we do. Overall we spent $400.32, and I was happier than a pig in a Las Vegas Buffet that we got right on our target.

Turns out stacking 20 cans tall is less than easy; we had to cut out a row and stack it 19 cans high, and it was all we could do to get the top row on. Our finished Tetris:

Note: that I had to tilt the camera a bit to make the tetris look straightish.

Sadly, mere hours later someone knocked it down. Or breathed near it, as you can see it's not the sturdiest of things. It needed to be completed in 3 hours, and my team rallied together saying we could make it again! Considering it took approximately 8 hours to make, I was less than hopeful. I honestly was just going to leave it at that and then something inside me said "Golly, you're really going to give up?!" Not one to let my inner monologue get the best of me I came up with an alternative plan. We were going to make a Rubik's cube. It would have all the same colors, require about the same amount of cans, wouldn't take too long and it would match the title we had chosen for Tetris of "Solving the Hunger Problem".

In the next 3 hours my team and I worked feverishly and made it just in time!

 

We slapped the new sign in front of the old Tetris one (as it was super cute and weren't ready to chuck it). The new sign says "Tetris was solved, but hunger wasn't. Now we give you Rubik's". It wasn't the prettiest CANstruction the Earth has ever seen, but it sure had a lot of heart put into it.