Too much plastic & the mysteriously slow airplane

I bought my immigration law textbook at the bookstore the other day and it came with lots of packaging. Yes, I know that books aren’t really in need of packaging usually, but nevertheless this one came with shrinkwrap (I guess just to show that it was new).

The book is actually a binder with loose-leaf pages. The loose-leaf pages were bound together in a thick layer of shrink-wrap. I peeled off the layer of shrink-wrap only to discover that underneath the shrink-wrap was a second independent layer of shrink-wrap. Apparently, these pages, already protected by being inside a thick 5-ring binder, needed the additional protection of two separate layers of packaging.

As I finally pulled out the loose-leaf pages and prepared to place them in the binder’s rings, I noticed something that blew my mind. Inside the pile of loose-leaf sheets was a set of tabbed sheets which could be used as dividers in the material. These special pages were themselves covered in a shiny layer of shrink-wrap. Yes, the tabbed pages were in shrink-wrap, in shrink-wrap, in shrink-wrap, in the binder.

Can anyone say a waste of packaging? How much plastic does a book really need?

I also ordered a textbook online. I ordered it from a company in Lawrence, Kansas, which is only about 30 miles away. You can drive there on the interstate in less than a half hour, but I was lazy and thought I’d just have it mailed to me so that I wouldn’t have to make the trip over just for a book.

They shipped it by 2-day air service.

Yes, a 48-hour delivery, by air-mail, for a city less than a half-hour away by car. Wow. What, did they have to fly the book to Atlanta first? The book is supposed to arrive on Monday, and I’d better see a sticker on it telling me it visited France or something.

If it was a direct flight, then just how slow is their airplane, anyway? My car can make it there in about 25 minutes. To take 2 days, the plane would need to be going something like six-tenths of 1 mile per hour. I walk almost three times faster than that speed. I’m pretty sure that you can’t even leave the ground at that speed, and I don’t think that you can call it air-mail if you just drive the plane to Topeka. If you can, in fact, leave the ground at that speed, I need to find out where to buy me some big honkin' wings to attach to my back.

If they do what I anticipate they’ll do, and fly the book to Kansas City first to a local distributor, then they have to realize that they just sent the book 40 miles in the opposite direction as Topeka. Then once the distributor has it in KC, the delivery driver will have to drive the book BACK to Lawrence on the way to Topeka.

I’m starting to think simply driving to Lawrence would have been the better choice.