Things Learned While Volunteering

I spent most of the afternoon at Impact, where I learned a great deal about the practical process of sorting through clothing donations. The biggest problem was for fashion-brainless physics students (there were two of us) to tell men's blue jeans from women's blue jeans.

At first we attempted to differentiate the gender's based on the size of the waist--men's sizes are about 20 larger than women's. However, each brand of jeans has the tag in a different location, and the tags can be lost. We finally started developing the ability to tell them apart by looking at the shapes of the hips of the jeans. (Apparently it says something about us well-behaved Church of Christ types that we haven't spent that much time looking at women's rears in blue jeans...)

I was also caught off guard when I was going through a bag of donations and I found Star Trek uniform. It was nonchalantly placed in a pile of pants...