Nerd Basket

We had our corporate golf tournament, SmartScramble, a few Fridays ago and there's an annual competition among the departments to create gift baskets for the event's silent auction. The department with the basket garnering the highest bid wins something. Pizza party, I think. I don't know because we hadn't done anything until this year.

It takes a ringleader and this hasn't been my jam so one of my colleagues stepped up and solicited a team to donate items. Of course, we had to pick a theme for the basket, too.

How do you narrow down the entire nerd/geek world into one themed basket? Well, you send a gazillion emails back and forth, talk about it at several meetings and present arguments over cube walls until someone makes an executive decision. My colleague finally did just that. Thank the gods.

Marvel, it was!

That's a lot of cool stuff!
We all hit up Amazon and selected items. After even more discussion, and mocking our colleague for suggesting DC character items, we narrowed it down to some pretty nice things:

  • Kids Spider-Man Chair
  • Marvel Encyclopedia 
  • Marvel RISK game
  • Marvel Character T-Shirt
  • Three Marvel Themed Bags
  • Marvel Backpack
  • Marvel Characters Fleece Blanket
  • Marvel Symbol Waffle Iron
Who would not want to win that!?!?!

We opened the bidding before the tournament (via an App written by one of our former colleagues - we love Apps) and I started a few items off with opening bids, including ours. I haven't made waffles in years but I figured I could start up again if I won. ;)

Actually, I was just trying to up our amount and went back and forth with someone else a few times. I found out later that it was another person in our department so I backed off. 

Come tournament day, I checked out how our basket was displayed and rearranged it to make the big items more prominent. Because I am a micro-manager on some things.

One of my friend's daughter really, really wanted the basket so he waited until the last few minutes of bidding and then sniped it. Successfully, too. It was cool that he made his daughter happy. It was also cool for him that he got a smoking deal. 

I have since seen waffle pictures with Captain America's shield on them so I know that iron is in use.

The coolest thing of all is that our total tournament donation was $40,000. Yeah, that's a big number! Our charity is Give Kids A Smile which helps to provide oral health services to underserved children. We're a big part of the Arizona budget and it's a charity very near and dear to us all.

BTW, I ended up not winning a single silent auction or raffle item. The latter loss made a lot of people happy because they're bitter, bitter individuals who think I win all the time.

Wait until next year - I will be victorious!

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