Who Who?

Who Who?
Originally uploaded by 365 Things

What: A pretty nice mailing tube...see rant. When we were really small children, we used to love to play with empty tubes of all sorts, using them like megaphones. (As if we needed to be amplified.) We called them "hoo hoos" because that's what we yelled through them, as we ran around like wild things.
Origin: A poster I purchased at an online store.
How long kept/usage: Hmmm. Probably at least 10 years. And not at all.
Why kept: It's Perfectly Good! It Might Be Useful. See confession.
Destination: Recycling.

Confession: This would have been useful -- for toting its original contents over to Housing Works, a Mark Rothko poster I blogged a few months back.   If only it hadn't been Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind hiding behind another storage box.

Confession/Rant: I recycled several boxes today. Some had stuff stored in them. (Storage Boxes Are Evil.)

This one had nothing stored in it, except for the kraft paper that the poster was wrapped in. (I must confess to feeling a frisson of fear when I checked inside that paper...what might be lurking in there? A Matisse print? Whew. Nothing. But I digress.)

Under USPS regulations, you can't re-use boxes, unless you've struck off all corporate logos. I'll bet that my local Mail Boxes Etc. would have taken this tube for re-use, it hadn't been imprinted with the name of the online store -- branded, right? -- over, and over, and over again.

Stores that brand their boxes like this (for what, free advertising in the landfill?) may as well imprint them with "don't recycle this box."

I'm not sure what the source of the USPS regulation is. Maybe to prevent people from fraudulently pretending that they are Amazon.com?

Sigh.