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Other Duties as Assigned Other Duties as
Other Duties as Assigned
Trash or Treasure? Feborah M. Dixon, CMP Meeting Planner, Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)
We were at our Leadership Conference in Arlington, Va., in the Marriott Crystal Gateway. Each year we do a drawing for a free conference registration for the next year. But when it came time for the drawing, everybody was running around looking for the fishbowl with the business-card entries in it that was at the silent auction the night before. Nobody can find it. We go to the per- son who was supposed to be in charge of it, and she said, “Uh ….” I was like, “Oh lord, what are we going to do?” So we go into Plan B: “Oh, we can have them fill out
new forms at the general session; we can do this, we can do that.” While everybody’s brainstorming, I sneak back down the hall where the silent auction was, catching Dee Dee, who was my meetings concierge, to go with me. I said, “Is there any way they got thrown away and we can find them?” She said, “We can look.” We found the big garbage bags and got over the ini-
tial “eww,” and opened them up. I was like, “OK, this is all food, get rid of this.” By the time we opened up
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the third or fourth bag, I see the business cards. Three quarters of them are not covered with last night’s dip. So we get in there, start pulling them out, grab a new fish- bowl, I started running them down the hall — because now they’re wondering where the heck I am. My boss sees me, and she’s like, “What is that?” “It’s the entries.” “You found the entries?” I said, “I found the entries — in the garbage. Eww!” She was like, “Oh, thank god.” We went through it, had the drawing, didn’t tell any-
body — and the person that was supposed to win really won. Because it was the year of or the year after the hur- ricane in New Orleans, and the woman that won had ex- tensive damage in New Orleans, and was not going to be able to do the annual conference the next year. Miles of sanitizer later, I got my first Spot Award from
SHRM for “Dumpster Diving.” — As told to Hunter R. Slaton
ILLUSTRATION BY DONGYUN LEE