Way back in 2009 I volunteered at the Midwestern Yoga Journal conference as a glorified bouncer.
At the time, I wore exclusively lycra, weighed nearly 100 pounds soaking wet, and was charged with keeping the peace amongst midwesterners, most of whom towered over me by many inches due to their Scandinavian bloodlines. I was a chihuahua who had battled the previous year at the New York Yoga Journal conference in a similar role, where bark was still more valuable than bite, but by a razor-narrow margin. My endorsement from that conference’s volunteer coordinator must have sparkled as I was welcomed back by an enthusiastic exclamation-laden email.
(more likely, the pool of applicants volunteering to travel to just outside of everywhere Wisconsin was thin).
This conference was different, which I knew on the pre-pre-event planning day when I joined the other dozens of volunteers to stuff schwag bags with free herbal tea samples and vegan chapsticks and arnica balm so that the folks paying gargantuan ticket price would feel that they got some thing great for free.
We fifty or so humans gathered in a conference room with two long lines of 8’ regulation conference tables and loads of boxes of yogish schwag to engage in an hours-long assembly line of trick-or-treat. On the back side of each table one volunteer would portion out one (or two!) microscopic granola bar samples, and a volunteer on the other side would hold out a bag and receive the $.13 item.
Each and every single, solitary, blessed time, the receiving volunteer would say, “thank you!” make eye contact, and move on down the line.
For many thousands of iterations, for many hours. Cluck, cluck, cluck.
”Thank you! Thanks! Thanks a lot!”
This is not how it was done in New York.
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