Not So Simple

It was supposed to be simple.

Put the broken laptop into a box and send it back with the label they provided.

Easy peasy, right?

Not so much.

First, the laptop was an odd size so finding a box that was long enough but not too tall proved to be no small feat.

I went to the UPS store. The only box they had would have had 5 inches of open space above the laptop.

Then to Menards. No boxes quite long enough.

Home Depot. Same.

By then I was getting pretty frustrated. Not just because of the hassle trying to find the right size box, but because of the whole situation.

This was a laptop we had bought only 4 months earlier, for Jacob and his engineering classes at college.

He needed this laptop with these particular programs. When it died, we tried to take it back to where we bought it to have them fix it, but it turned out we had to ship it back to the manufacturer.

We didn't have time, so I paid for a new laptop in the meantime. And these things aren't cheap.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to most cost-efficiently ship this thing back to them.

After several hours of driving around with no success in finding a box, I decided to go home and get creative.

There's a pile of boxes in my basement that I keep for gifts and whatever I might need an empty box for. You never know, right?

In that pile, I found one that was at least long enough to fit the original laptop box in. There were four inches of space above it, but I wasn't about to spend anymore time looking.

I packed that thing full of anything I could find that would cushion it - bubble wrap, cardboard, some random carpet padding, foam from a box from the Keurig I bought a couple years ago.

I really didn't care what it looked like at that point, as long as the thing was secure.

I taped up the box, slapped the $40 shipping label on it, and headed to the post office.

Only to find that I had purchased the wrong label. Apparently, I needed the one with the big "H" on it because of the lithium battery.

Could this get any more frustrating?

Back home. Reprinted the correct label. Taped the new label on the box.

When I finally handed over that box, I had to laugh.

It got me thinking about how often we can underestimate the simple things. A quick errand. An easy task. Something we think will only take 15 minutes to complete.

I've learned over the years to expect a curveball or two.

Because sometimes the things that sound so simple...just aren't.

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