The Last Bits of Summa Summa Summa Time!
It’s October and we are loving it – summery days, fallish nights and ludicrous amounts of packages being shipped from the warehouse. Outside, the garden is winding down but still holding its own. The lambs that came in the spring to chomp on the grass around the solar panels have doubled in size and grown into full-on sheep, and the lawn has never looked so trim and tidy.
Summer is kind of our “off” season (if we have one), and so it’s the time when we embark on new projects and let our creative wings spread even fuuuurther than usual. This summer the kitchen got a complete overhaul and was transformed to a cozy and decorative area of form and function and tasty natural snacks. It looks like something from a magazine. A warm, interesting magazine with paper that has texture you can feel and a nice muted color scheme. There’s a wall sized bulletin board that we use for fun and information and to share our oddball company culture with everyone. We need that kind of platform because Blue Q is kind of off center in a lot of ways. It’s this bubble of collaboration and good will and creativity. We’re not down with hierarchy and competition and one-upmanship; we thrive on the exchange of ideas and energy and positivity. Who has time to go around being non-wonderful? Not us! Instead we’re unloading trucks and packing orders into artful corrugated boxes and playing pranks on each other and hanging stuff on the walls and stocking shelves and making stuff and bantering and helping each other out and sending random emails and drinking coffee and being creative and and and…well you get the idea.
If the hearth is the heart of the home, then BCARC is the soul of Blue Q. BCARC stands for Berkshire County ARC, an organization that offers services and employment opportunities to individuals “with developmental disabilities, brain injuries, and autism”. Blue Q has been working with these wonderful folks for twenty years and loving every minute of it. Their room got a work over too, with new fiery red tables and a wall of swivel panels and a section for growing plants. Everyone is involved in the garden and they get outside and pick fresh veggies, and pull weeds and make salads and salad dressing and there are extra beets and beans and peas for everyone to snack on all day.
Since May, the warehouse has received One hundred and ninety fucking four pallets of socks. Crew socks, ankle socks, men’s socks. Our ‘sock room’ is fit to bust. I’ve done the math and run this by our analysis department and it all adds up to exactly twenty seven kajillion happy, warm-footed customers ready to take on the fall with spirit, snark, and brightly colored cotton on their toes. And that’s just socks – never mind all the other bags, hand sanitizers, lip balms, and gum.
One afternoon, in the middle of this record breaking, gravity defying year of productivity and efficiency, we decided to just screw around for an afternoon and film a segment for NCTV's Crowdsourced Cinema Project. We put our imaginations together, gathered a bunch of goofy props and a fake moustache, and blew off a little steam with some cardboard, some water balloons, and an old bike.
Did I mention how much we love art at Blue Q? What’s that? Oh, you could tell from our careful packaging, colorful colors and attention to detail. I should have known. Anyway, that’s why we are prepping to have an enormous mural painted on the wall of our outer corridor. We're not telling yet what it will be, but it's going to be brilliant believe you me. And vibrant and new and Q-y as all hell and you have never seen anything like it.
All we’re really trying to say here is that we just want you to be happy.
Can you do that for us? You can?
Yes! Knew it.
