missing you

Mrs. Pincus has an eBay business… and no! she will not sell your stuff for you. She will, however, happily take your unwanted small boxes, bubble wrap, packing material and padded envelopes. You can either drop these items off on our front porch or she will come to your location (within reason) and pick them up. 

My wife has put the word out for boxes and things on a fairly regular basis. And, on a fairly regular basis, our front porch is overflowing with all shapes and sizes of boxes and such… some that can be used in her business and some that cannot. The things that she has no use for (including newspaper, large boxes and Priority Mail boxes that have gone through the postal system once) are added to our weekly recycling bin and taken to the curb on trash collection day.

While she is grateful for the boxes that people are kind enough to save for her, I am still puzzled by the thing that people thing qualifies as “useable packing material.” Among piles of suitable boxes, we have found empty packages from baked goods with a big cellophane “window” and the bottoms of which are covered with crumbs. We’ve received product boxes from make-up – tiny boxes of flimsy cardboard that once held a tube of lipstick, not more than two inches long. What could we possibly ship in a box like that? We’ve found pieces of Kleenex and crumpled fast-food wrappers. In other words, trash. 

We have also discovered unusual items mixed among a stack of boxes. Things like bags of screws that came with a purchased item to aid in assembly. Sometimes we have found the ordered item itself. We once even found a credit card lying at the bottom of an opened Amazon box. People are very particular about obscuring their home address on a shipping label, but not so concerned with making sure they have removed the item they bought before discarding the box. 

Mrs. P takes the usable boxes to her shipping office, where it will be reused at some point in time. Sometimes, a box or envelope may sit for months – or even years – until it is deemed the perfect vehicle for a particular item’s journey through the delivery process. 

This week, Mrs. P needed to ship a small poster of some sort. She selected a sturdy cardboard mailer that a kind soul donated some time ago. She opened the mailer to secure the purchased item only to find that something was already inside. She reached in and extracted a large diploma from New York University. Shocked, she pulled a similar-sized mailer that was on the shelf, as it was received at the same time. This one contained a diploma from the University of California. The names on the address labels on both mailers had been blackened with marker but the original postmarks were still legible. They read “2018” and “2020” respectively. These envelopes were setting on a shelf for at least three years waiting to be used.

Mrs. P didn’t recognize the names on either diploma. Because the recipient’s name was crossed out, she had no idea who could have dropped this off at our house… three years ago. 

So, she took to the always ready, usually helpful social media, specifically Facebook. Logging in to a group for our immediate neighborhood, she posted the scenario. To combat those who would tell her to just contact the names on the diploma, she added that the names of the graduates may not be the ones who dropped off the envelopes. 

Not too long after her post, she was contacted by the embarrassed mother of the diploma recipients. She said those envelopes must have been gathered up with other, emptier envelopes without even checking the contents. Why weren’t the diplomas framed and hanging on a wall? Why weren’t they missed – one for three years and one for five? Didn’t one of those kids ask where their diploma was? Perhaps a prospective employer didn’t need proof of graduation. 

So many questions. 

We still want your boxes though. Who knows what we’ll find next?

 

www.joshpincusiscrying.com