When Vermont.NET does not have a sponsor to cover the cost of pizza & soda, the attendees pay for their own – $5 each. This was the case at Monday’s meeting. Additionally, we were doing a fundrasing raffle for the first time ever, using a license to Infragistics NetAdvantage that was donated by Infragistics. The raffle was $5. There were about 25 people at the meeting.

Usually, collecting the money is a subtle thing that happens in the background and I have not even had to do it in years as another user group member has been grabbing the cash on my behalf. But I was doing it on Monday and wouldn’t you know it, but everyone had 20’s. Nobody seemed to have change. In over 5 years and 70 meetings, this has never happened before. It took a good 15 minutes or more to get it all sorted out. While I’m laughing about it now, it was totally chatoic and embarrassing at the time. We had a bunch of new attendees and our speaker, Mark Mullin (who helped come up with change for a 20) from New Hampshire. I could only imagine what they were thinking!

So my lesson? I guess from now on, I’ll just have to add in “20’s not accepted”.