I don't usually use this space to complain about arboreal issues but I felt the need to make an exception as I stood in the kitchen amidst the decimated remnants of what had to have been untold numbers of trees and sundry plants, modern and ancient.
But let me begin at the beginning as authors are wont to do. Like many folks these days both my better half and I use medicines delivered by a "self-injecting" pen-like device. (Fully prescribed medications, obtained by our personal physician - nothing "dark web" or back alley.)
You may be familiar with these injectors - you hold them against the injection site, click the button on top and the injector, "injects," with varying degrees of discomfort - 1 equaling "Huh, no big deal" to 10 being "Ahhhhh, damn, damn! That hurts!" Well, after one such attempt the reaction was, "Hmmm. Nothing." The injector had failed.
A brief conversation with our friendly neighborhood pharmacist informed us that we needed to seek replacement of this pricy, or "spendie" depending on your local dialect, little gizmo from the company whom manufactured it. So we contacted them.
This required a number of back-and-forth emails amongst ourselves, the drug company and our doc, all necessary, it seems, to determine that neither we nor our physician or any close relatives or casual acquaintances were now, or had been at anytime, employees or representatives of a currently active drug cartel or other nefarious entity operating outside the law in this or any other incorporated area. We indicated that we had, to our direct knowledge, no such relationships.
All this led to a large, 18x15x15 package arriving on our porch. See large box in attached photo. Stickers on the box indicated it should be opened immediately and refrigerated.
"Honey," I called, "The frozen turkey you order has arrived." She indicated, firmly, that she had ordered no such product, nor any other large perishable foodstuffs.
The package, we discovered after digging through all the items you see in the pic, was "necessary" to deliver one, count 'em, or rather count it, I repeat one medical auto injector 6 inches long and about three-quarters of an inch in diameter. We are left with multiple "ice packs" and a futuristic double-walled, form-fitted, government and FDA approved styrofoam container suitable for mailing medically approved human organs or suspicious biohazards anywhere in the world.
And I need to mention that the company also sent an only slightly smaller set of double boxes for us to return the defective injector - same size as the replacement - a three-quarters of an inch in diameter tube six inches long. The multiple prepaid labels were, we assume, designed to prevent us from selling the defective injector on the dark web where the 1.5ml dosage could generate millions for the aforementioned cartel trolls who spend hours lurking online for just this kind of score.
I shudder to think of the countless hours spend by various government committees, not to mention the billable hours spent by equally countless attorneys - public and private, whose machinations have generated the, no doubt, hundreds and hundreds of pages of dense legal prose the contents of which define the requirements that - in order to stay inside the law - result in big pharma pushing a variety of polluting industries to ramp up the harvesting of acres of trees to produce the boxes and the pumping of millions of barrels of oil - harvested from the ancient plant life mentioned waaay up at the beginning of this post - to produce the styrofoam and "freezer friendly" global warming cold packs shipped to us. (Try reading that sentence in one breath!)
But really, don't you think big pharma could of just sent a letter saying something like:
"Hi. We are so sorry our injector failed. Enclosed please find a check for $47.50, the retail cost to compensate you for the cost of the failed injector. Please return the failed injector to the physician who prescribed it. They will be able to prescribe a replacement.
Please pardon us for any inconvenience caused by our defective injector. As additional compensation we have enclosed another check in the sum of $2,500.00 to allow you to purchase a purebred puppy of your choice.
Peace and Good Health,
Your friends at big pharma."
OK. I made up that bit about the puppy - but have you priced lab puppies recently?! But other than that, doesn't that seem a more reasonable solution to our simple injector replacement request than the web of factory production, phone calls, emails, signatures, and postal deliveries in which we were unwitting participants?
Really.
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