In April, almost a year after my father died, Donna and I flew back to Missouri to see my family. While there we decided to ship a few small items home, mostly military memorabilia my father had collected. We took the stuff to the nearest UPS store and left the packing and shipping to them — which wasn’t cheap, by the way, but Lois insisted on paying, so how could we say no?
Yesterday we finally opened our UPS boxes. We were almost done rearranging the garage when it occurred to us that many of the items we’d shipped home needed to be stored there, and that we couldn’t finish the garage project until we’d opened the boxes.
Damn, UPS, how many styrofoam peanuts can you pack in eight boxes?
We were looking at several cubic yards of packing material and about one cubic foot of military memorabilia. We had a disposal problem.
My initial plan, to scoop the peanuts into plastic garbage bags, proved unworkable due to static cling — for every armful of peanuts we’d scoop out of a box, another armful would stick to us, and yet another armful would stick to the outside of the plastic garbage bag. Simply dumping the peanuts into our large outside garbage bins wasn’t the answer either — two boxes worth completely filled both bins, and there were still six boxes to go.
We finally dumped all the peanuts into the two largest boxes (and I don’t even want to talk about having to sweep up all the ones that got away and drifted all around our living room and kitchen), but that presented another problem: our waste disposal company doesn’t take cardboard boxes unless they’re broken down and flattened.
My plan was to put the boxes in the back of my car, drive behind the nearest shopping center, and find an open dumpster. But I remembered that the last time I tried that, all the dumpster lids were padlocked shut. So Donna called the local UPS store to ask if they’d take the peanuts back. Yes, they said, and off I went. But as I neared the corner shopping center, I thought I’d just take a quick cruise around the back. And lo & behold, someone at Ace Hardware had left the dumpster open! Bet he won’t do that again!
I’ll probably have peanut nightmares for the next two to three years. But I gotta give UPS this, though — they pack stuff real well.