Packing Peanuts

I had a beautiful rant all typed up on how horrible television commercials for “social introduction” phone lines are but it was pretty harsh so I decided to not post it. It’s too easy to blast some model who is unconvincingly trying to tell me that spending the night at home alone while talking to complete strangers on the phone is her favorite thing to do. I like to think that I’m above taking such cheap shots but how stupid do these people think I am? Like she’s so socially inept that the only way to meet people is by paying $4.99 a minute. Get these commercials off of the air.

Anyways… What I finally decided to write about is packing peanuts. You know, the things that you use when shipping a big box with a small item inside so that it doesn’t break? While they may prove useful to many people, I strongly dislike them.

Did you know that Styrofoam packing peanuts will explode? Yeah. When they get smashed, they don’t just go flat, they explode. Then you have a million small pieces of Styrofoam all over the floor.

If they just exploded though, I could still deal with them. But they also develop very bad static electricity; even the static-free ones. So basically you step on one, it explodes into a million pieces and then sticks all over your shoe and creeps up the leg of your pants. You can try removing the pieces of foam but then they just stick to your fingers. The only way to get them off is by eating them but then you die from constipation because Styrofoam isn’t very easy to digest.

The reason that I mention this is because at work I use a lot of packing peanuts. I’ll send out shipments where a box is full of them. The box then comes back to me full of exploded, static-laden bits of foam. I vacuumed the floor around my desk yesterday but then received about a dozen boxes today full of them. The floor is a mess of foam that sticks to my shoes and chair. I can’t escape it! They’re everywhere!
I think that the person that invented them must be very sadistic.