The Call (Or How To Package)

Well, that was surprising. There was a good episode of 'BUGS'! We'll get back to that in due course, but it was a surprise. Jesse Birdsall was even likeable! Of course, this is all just a diversion, to buy time while I try to remember just what... Oh! Better go back and change the title.

The Call came today. After years of being free of it, the Call came, and Sid Meier's hold returned. Yes, turn-based computer games came back with a vengeance, in the form of 'Alpha Centauri', one of the best computer games to ever be released. Oh, so many hours have been spent colonizing that blasted fungus-enriched world, and being endlessly betrayed by those creeps Chairman Yang, Sister Miriam, and the loony Santiago of the Spartans. So many hours! You click, and click, and take turn after turn, until the world becomes a grey splurge. And it's wonderful. It probably deserves a post of its own, if I'm ever freed from it.

Maybe 'Alpha Centauri' is a displacement activity, as wrapping and packaging awaits. The only problem with finishing your Christmas shopping is that you then have to send all the items off. This requires lots of bubblewrap, tape, brown paper, and a ridiculous amount of patience and organisation. Packaging is one of the most annoying and frustrating things to do in the civilized world, but it's important to do it right. It's more important to make it reusable than to use the bare minimum of stuff.

Yes, it's far too easy to take the easy route in packaging, but if you do it right then you really can make almost all the materials used reusable. If you wrap it in simple bubblewrap, then that can be re-used flexibly by the recipient. The same is true for the brown paper. Boxes are pretty worthless, so it's best to avoid those if at all possible, as well as those horrible plastic bags that masquerade as mailers and can only go in the bin, and padded envelopes, which are utterly inflexible in their applications. Be old-fashioned, and remember to leave an easy way for the person at the other end to get in, so the packaging isn't ruined!

No, this wasn't intended to be a lecture on how to wrap things, but it worked out. Didn't it?

O.