immediately going on and on and it took me a full fifteen minutes to get her to realize that I couldn’t hear her, because apparently the speaker had been smudged over with mustard. If you have ever tried to have a conversation through mustard, or a condiment of any kind, then you know that one person winds up not being able to understand a single thing. Once I had gotten my great-aunt to settle down and finish her sandwich, I was able to get to the bottom of things. Apparently she was very concerned because she had to order some custom shipping boxes but one of her dogs had run away and turned up in South Dakota. She absolutely needed to go and retrieve her retriever, but she absolutely needed to restock her custom shipping boxes. She would be far behind in orders if she waited until she got back. Could I, would I, please place the order for her?
How hard it could it be?
Sure, I said. Go to PackagingSupplies.com, she told me, and scroll through the custom shipping boxes. She told me which ones she needed, and how many. We hung up the phone. You might be wondering what I did next. Well, I went to PackagingSupplies.com, and I scrolled through the custom shipping boxes.
It’s a good thing that my great-aunt from Maine told me exactly what she wanted; there were so many options I could have ordered her boxes big enough to put a body inside of, or boxes to put her sandwiches in. She wanted one case of the clear white lid boxes, size 7 X 5 ½ X 1, which includes cotton filler, and comes one hundred pieces to a case. Be careful not to forget the stretch loops, she had hollered as we were hanging up. The what? I had hollered back. The elastic ties, she clarified. I probably would have figured out that she needed these on my own, since the link to the ‘stretch loops’ was right next to the one for the boxes, which was a handy marketing choice, if you ask me. So I ordered three bundles of the ten-inch decorative gold elastic ties. Order complete. Easy as one, two, three. Literally.
When my great-aunt returned to her home in Maine, after hunting down her hound dog in the bayous of Louisiana (are you sure I said a retriever from South Dakota?), she was able to jump right back into business. She had everything on hand just as if she had done it herself. Which she could have if she owned a smart phone, or a tablet of some kind, instead of insisting on sticking to the contraption still attached to her wall. I’m pretty sure it was Alexander Graham Bell’s first model.
Wouldn’t want people just tossing these babies around, now would we? Which is exactly what people do when there aren’t instructions printed largely, and clearly, on the item. Not that I blame them. It would be rather tiresome, if not impossible, to handle each and every package as if it carried…well, hazardous material. I could try to explain how the hazardous shipping containers are different from your standard cardboard shipping boxes, but I don’t think that I can.