April 2nd 2011: International Pillowfight day!!

 Three years ago, Björn and me met, a week before IPfD and spontaneously decided to organise this event in Zurich. It was a great day and a great fight, with about 30 participants.

 This year we and co-organisator Nicole saw ourselves confronted with a slightly different challenge: Looking at the fb event today there are 1413 people signed up.

1413.

Of course that doesn't mean just as many actual participants, but it was safe to assume that the counts would easily go up to 10 times the number of the first year.

Boy oh boy!

First we decided we needed something else than a few friendly hands, garbage bags and brooms to do the cleaning. We organised a machine that is normally used to suck up leaves from gardens or pavement (leaf sucker? leaf vacuum?). We knew that this would cost us a bit and since we all organise these events for our own fund we thought it would only be fair to let the people chip in a bit.

So we told them, that they could order their pillows from us for 5 Sfr, we would bring them to the event place and put the money towards covering our expenses.
We thought it was a genious idea. We still had quite a lot of pillows from the last two events.
Well, we thought we had.
anything along these lines?
Then, on Friday lunchtime, we had orders for 200 pillows.

200.

Have you ever approached a shop assistant at IKEA and sweetly asked them: "Could you help me please? I want to buy 180 pillows."?

You should, just for the sheer fun of the faces. Although I don't wish you to be in the same situation that I found myself in on that Friday afternoon, knowing I  had exactly two hours to get it done because I had to be at the guerilla gardening event that evening. It was really so tight I would have been late if even just one thing had taken me longer than it did that day. Thirty minutes to get to the place, 30 minutes to get the pillows and pay

(I have to insert here: I know IKEA is certainly not the greenest place to buy, and buyint 180 pillow just for a 20 minutes pillowfight is one of the ungreenes things I can think of. But dang, what would you have done? I sheepishly assumed the 20 pillows I had in my attic would be enough and it would be so frugal to use them again and even make them help us with the money... and whatever you say against IKEA - bless them, this Friday, the blue-and-yellow team was my hero. After the first surprise and questions if this was an April's fool, one of the assistants helped me get 14 of their vacuumised stock-packeges in two trolleys and wrote me a receipt so that the person at the cash only had to scan once - and out I was. I had already made catastrophe scenarios about where else to go if they didn't have enough pillows. Pha! My purchase hadn't even scrached the surface of their stocks!!)

And then one agonising hour back (for a distance that normally takes ten minutes) in a traffic jam right out of hell.

In a way I was quite glad I didn't have to worry about organising the actual day of the fight, because I would be working at the yurt site cleeaning everything up before our contract ended that very weekend.
Although looking at the pictures of course makes me jealous and I am very happy everybody had fun and it all went well enough.

 

When have you had your last pillow fight? ;o)

Ps: If you wanna see more pictures, klick here for another blog post and a great album and here for the fb event page and look through all the gorgeous albums.