The World’s Most Perfect Packaging

Monday, 18 June 2012

So, I don’t know if anyone out there ever checks out the Books I’ve Read This Year tab on my site here (you can click to it above), but let me share a few things about it with you…

First: Go me! I’ve successfully kept up with it for over five months now.

Second: If you sort by “Grade” (the rightmost column), you will see I have now given at least one book every letter grade available. Way to celebrate diversity!

Third: I added a new “Reason” option. Before, there were only four reasons listed for why I read any book…

1. Class. This means the book was assigned to me in a class at work or at my university, and I had to read it.

2. Kids. This means I read the book to my son (and possibly) my daughter.

3. Review. This means the book’s publisher (or, possibly, author) sent me a free copy of the book with the understanding that I read it and write a review of it to appear in The Minnesota Atheist newsletter and website.

4. FTHOI. This stands for “For the Hell of It,” because, let’s face it, every once in a while I do read a book simply for my own enjoyment or to learn how to improve on something in my own personal life.

But now I added this reason:

Editor. This indicates I was an editor for the book, and thus read it carefully several times.

…and I think that’s a plenty cool reason to add, don’t you?

Fourth: If you sort by author, you’ll notice that Owen and I have read a heap of Ron Roy offerings. If you look carefully, you’ll notice we’ve read the A to Z Mystery books from H through U. Except T. “Hey!” you shout unneccessarily loudly, “Where’s the ‘T’ book?”

Well, the thing is, Owen and I read it last year. In fact, that book – The Talking T-Rex was the first A to Z Mystery book we read. I didn’t even know if was a series of books back then. But, while reading it, I realized the book was part of a series, and so Owen and I commenced reading the books, beginning with the letter A. We read A through G back in 2011, and we’ve been reading from H on this year. After reading the S book (The School Skeleton) I asked him if he wanted to reread the T book, just so that we could read them in order. He didn’t want to, even though I told him he was wrong (just kidding). Even if we hd reread it, though, I wouldn’t list it here, since, as the introduction points out, I am only listing books that I read for the first time this year.

Tuesday, 19 June 2012

 So, today was the big forum thingy that I first talked about HERE.

Since I was scheduled to present at 2:50 this afternoon, I spent the first 8 hours of the day nervous. After a while, I got to feeling that maybe I was just nervous about being nervous, if that makes any sense. So then I calmed down somewhat.

I was pleased to see that my boss’ boss left the auditorium about an hour before my speech. I was hoping he’d be a no-show but – wouldn’t you know it? – he decided to re-attend the forum about ten miunutes before I was set to go on stage. I think he timed his arrival to coincide with the ice cream, which the catering staff brought in a few minutes before my speech. I considered delivering my speech while chomping down on a Choco Taco, but then came to my senses.

For me, the highlight of the day was when one engineer made the case that there is such a thing as a perfect package. He claimed the best packaging for a product is…can you guess it?

PEZ dispensers!

Yep. He noted that they are functional, attractive, and easy to operate. He displayed a photo of a portion of his collection of some 200 disoensers. While he did, I realized that he’s probably right. After all, how often do we care more about the packaging than the product itself? People just eat the forgettable candy right away. But the dispensers? Those are collectors’ items.