putting all my hot air to good use

Ever since I started this blog I wanted to do a post about a particularly awesome experience of mine, but I needed the perfect opportunity to do it.

(the view from outside our building -- look carefully! ha hahahahaha!)

I suppose the one-year anniversary of the event is the perfect opportunity. Before I begin, Happy Birthday JJ!

A year ago, myself and many others were excited to celebrate a monumental birthday for our dear work friend JJ. Let’s just say it wasn’t her 49th birthday but it wasn’t her 51st birthday. Somewhere in between.

We decided to fill her office with balloons. “How cool!” you say. Yes, it was very cool. Unfortunately, we didn’t know how to go about it. First, I called a company that does “this kind of thing” and they quoted me a $2,000 price tag to fill her office with balloons. Whatev-a!

So, I set to cyberspace to find out how to do it. It seems no one had ever done this before, or if they had, they had neglected to blog about it. So, here I am, paving the way for any of you who wish to do this in the future.

• Step 1. We took measurements of her office. I seem to recall that it measured 9 feet wide by 12 feet long by 12 feet tall, or 1,296 cubic feet.
  
• Step 2. One of “us,” the partners-in-crime, has another life where she does weddings and parties, etc., and she was able to secure balloons for us at wholesale cost. We decided to go with 13-inch balloons, in a multitude of colors. (All black seemed a bit too morbid.)
  
• Step 3. How many balloons did we need? Let’s do the math. If you pretend that 13-inch-diameter balloons are actually square (which would make them 2,197 cubic inches), and you stack them in a 1,296-cubic-foot room (or a 2,239,488-cubic-inch room), you’d need 1,109 balloons. But, since balloons AREN’T square, and they’d fall in on themselves a bit, we added a couple hundred to that number. I think we bought 1,400 balloons and actually blew up 1,200.
  
• Step 4. Showtime. The thought of blowing up 1,200 balloons by hand is quite daunting, so we decided to rent a compressor. Not only that, we were able to get a splitter for our air compressor and two hoses, so we could use one compressor and do double duty. It was awesome. Lucky for us, the day before the celebratory birthday was a Sunday, so we all gathered Sunday afternoon and went to work. Some people brought their fitness ball airpumps, we had our compressor, and others went with good-old reliable mouth airpower. There were six of us. We got started at maybe 1 or 2 and went until 4 pm? Yeah, it only took us ~3 hours to blow up 1,200 balloons!!!
  

(Shanester, doing his blowing-up duty)

The things we didn’t count on (for those of you trying this at home):

• A lot of the balloons popped. Casualties are just to be expected. It seemed for every balloon we threw in the room, one or two would pop underneath it. Luckily, the pile somehow kept growing so we were making progress.
  
• The further along we got, the harder it got to keep the balloons in the room. We had to set up a “retaining wall” per se using a huge piece of cardboard, just so we could keep the door open and keep the balloons in.

(the joy spilleth over)

• Tying them all by hand got to be quite painful. If we did it again, we’d buy some plastic ties or something. They do make those.
  
• We didn’t get all the way to the ceiling. We were just so pooped. But it was a lot of balloons.

Of course, the next day was just priceless. She was so surprised. We all laughed and laughed. And, the entire office smelled liked latex (we even got complaints).

(the whole office looked like this pretty much all day)

Happy Birthday, JJ. Let the good times roll!

P.S. Re: cost.... the compressor only cost about $40-$50 to rent. Add that to the really nice cake that someone bought, plus the cost of balloons, and in the end, I think the 6 of us chipped in about $20 each for the event. Way better than $2,000 right? I should go into business.