It might be difficult to see what this is, but I’ll save you from the suspense–It’s replacement razor heads for my electric shaver. What you probably don’t know is that there are three replacement heads in the small blue box, each about the size of a quarter and about twice as thick. I had imagined that I would find a padded envelope in my mailbox one afternoon, and I’d be excited to receive my stupid-expensive replacement heads inside with a note that said they were “Lovingly packed by Gladys.”
I was very excited when I saw a large box on my front step, because for a minute, I thought my wife bought me something cool like a new Dewalt Miter Saw, or a collection of books, or maybe some new chrome parts for my Fairlane that I still hope will have license plates again some day. Then, I saw the label. Oh. It’s from… what? They’ve shipped the wrong stuff. Probably.
Shock One: They shipped that little blue box to me in that ginormous box. The loaded box was actually lighter than the empty box, because they filled it with bags of air. Not just any air, but the special kind of air used to keep UPS trucks filled to capacity. So if you were the UPS guy, wouldn’t you be a little bit ticked that you had to lug around these giant boxes surrounding something the size of three quarters? I could have bought 200 sets of replacement razor heads (except that would have cost me $5,000), and they could have shipped them all in the same box.
But Shock Two: Come on, Philips Norelco… If you’re going to ship the heads with ten backs of self-contained protective wind, at least get the dumb things into the middle of the box.
Michael Crowl - Author 