[78-L] HELP! I'm buried in STYROFOAM!!!

[Michael Biel]

T'was the day before Christmas and I knew I was in trouble when the Post 
Office lady wheeled my package out on a handtruck!  It was 20x20x10 and 
it had a Kurt Nauck mailing label on it.  I knew I had gotten a lot of 
16-inchers in his unsold list, but not enough to fill THAT box!  I added 
the other two packages I had received that day -- those were small 
enough to fit into the package lock-boxes -- and started to wheel the 
hand-truck out to the van. 


Half-way out the door I stopped in horror.  Wait a second.  This package 
came from KURT THE STYROFOAM KING!!!  This guy has a truck-sized bag of 
pellets up on a raised loft in his two-story high packing room with a 
blower sending them down a 10-inch wide hose into the boxes below.  He 
don't mess around.  Styrofoam pellets are as serious to him as old 
records are!  If I waited till I got home to open this up I would be 
buried in styrofoam peanuts and be unable to get rid of them for the 
next seven months.  I had to unpack the box in the Post Office and let 
THEM worry about it!   I propped the box up on a counter in a aisle 
different from the one with my P.O. box, cut the tape, and c a r e f u l 
l y opened one of the flaps.  No matter how  s l o w l y   I did it , 
Woosh!, out flew a dozen of those white E pellets of static 
electricity!  As I tried my best to scoop them into the trash barrel, I 
discoverd the secret behind that HUGE box.  The M.M. Cole C&W ETs were 
housed in albums, not sleeves.  I lifted those out, hoping that the 
pellets that clung to the plastic the Coles were wrapped in would not 
fall on the floor before I could pick them off and put them in the barrel. 

And then,  surrounded by pellets on all six sides was ANOTHER BOX!  And 
it, too, was bound to be filled with styrofoam.  And it was, along with 
about 20 ETs in cardboard, one lonely 10-inch record in cardboard, and 
three little books (more about one of them in another posting) in a 
plastic bag.  By the time I got all the pelletts out of the boxes, off 
my sweater, out of my beard, and up off the floor, I had filled the 
barrel up to the brim and I carefully tied the garbage bag top so that 
they wouldn't fly out all over the place.  I hope the janitor wasn't 
curious why the bag was already filled and tied and tried to take a peek. 

I loaded my record packets and the empty boxes in the van, returned the 
hand-truck, and took the slightly bashed big box over to the cardboard 
recycling bin outside my former building at the university.  So now as I 
listen to the Gopher Hole Diggers "sing" "There'll be a Hillbilly 
Wedding In June", "Gonna Galop My Gal To Guadalupe", "He's A Hillbilly 
Gaucho With A Rumba Beat", "We'd Like To Swap the Old Jalop", and a song 
dedicated to my Canadian friend Graham "The Newtons Are Feudin' Again", 
I'm resting my weakened heart from my latest adventure in unpackin' a 
Nauck box!

Mike (now they're singing "Ya Gotta Quit Kickin' My Dawg Around") Biel  
mbiel at mbiel.com