Green Your Bingo
Went to play Bingo the other night with a few hundred people that actually knew what they were doing. Bingo sure has gotten complicated since the 80s. Honestly, I’m not sure if its because of improved technology, or if people just got bored with the 5-in-a-row garden variety game.
The new games like Kite, Picture Frame, X, L, etc. require a lot more attention than 5-in-a-row and I could barely keep up with looking for the current number being called, much less scan my cards for the winning patterns. Considering that a majority of the players were senior citizens with worse vision and slower hands than mine, it was quite a shock how much faster than me they were at playing each number. Plus, they played the bonus side games that compliment the actual bingo game being played. Don’t ask for more details, I have no idea how the bonus games work. Couldn’t keep up with them!
In all, I think there were around 20 different games that night, not counting the bonus games. For each game, a player has at least one sheet with 6 bingo cards printed on it. Pretty much every player that night used 2 sheets, which means they played 12 cards. That’s a lot of numbers to scan!
A quick calculation of 300 players, with 2 sheets per game, for 20 games tallies to 12,000 sheets of paper that we burned through in a mere 3 hours. TWELVE THOUSAND pieces of paper, on the conservative side! And not a blue trash can in sight. Not a thought to recycling any of that paper. In fact, the volunteers that run the Bingo nights provide handy little trash bags for players to keep at their seat so that they can dispose of their sheets at the end of each game.
While I’m all for using Bingo as a fundraiser for the church that runs it, they really need to think about the other green.
