Waste not, Walmart

Not sure if this is a good statement, a bad one or even fairly neutral, but I finally saw “Frozen.” I’d tried to see it in three different countries and failed miserably. This week, I borrowed a copy and watched it twice so far.

My latest Netflix movie was “The Descendants,” which I also saw this week. That one went totally under my radar (as do most these days) but it was well worth it. Sometimes the “suggested viewing” stuff works out well.

I really don’t know much of what is in theaters these days. I do know I’m not a big summer movie buff, so I don’t think I’m missing much now. But my Netflix queue is running low, and even though I only get one every six weeks or so, I do need to figure out what to add to it.

“Honeysuckle Rose” is up next, and I’ve also borrowed “Dallas Buyer’s Club.”

Probably won’t have time for a lot of movies coming up, because this next week is pretty booked and my travels start this weekend. My first destination is Guilin, which will be my first foray into China. It’s about an hour’s flight.

I’m traveling with a colleague so I hope that works out well. There is some apprehension. I’m really not used to traveling with people. This trip was originally planned to accompany her, but then she didn’t buy the plane ticket after I did and I’d given up on her coming along; she finally bought a ticket last week and now I’ve had to change my reservations, which were made in the 6-8 weeks where I thought I was going alone.

The tourist reviews from the city are pretty fantastic, though, so it should be nice. And inchallah, my camera will work. For whatever reason, I have terrible luck with camera batteries. My Canon point-and-shoot just sucks them dry.

I still have a week of work to go through before the first trip, though. And it could be a doozy. Last week was pretty chill because my supervisor was gone but toward the end some projects came down the pipe that I wasn’t able to start because I needed more information. When that starts trickling in, I’ll be swamped in paperwork.

There’s always lots of that, in the real or e-kind. We keep printers busy, if not happy.

As I was trying to crank out something or another, someone else tried to print and the little thing made an awful noise. The guy came and tried to fix it, then called another guy over there to jigger with it. (“Hey, you fixed this last time; can you come look it again?”)

The other guy came over and I heard under-the-breath mutterings and then the first guy left the scene, saying he wasn’t able to help. The second guy made a lot of noise and then abandoned ship, too.

When I finished my stuff, I got up and walked over. I opened the hood, popped the toner cartridge out and pulled out a jammed piece of paper.

From his desk, Guy No. 2’s jaw dropped. “How did you do that?” I said I’d just pulled it out. “I had no idea you could do that.”

Seriously? How do you not know this?

I swear, I work with people who are at genius level but have virtually no common sense sometimes. Another time at a different copier, a higher-pay-grade-than-me person came to me, saying it’d stopped and she didn’t know why. I said look at the display; it tells you explicitly what to do and even gives you pictures. Still, she was baffled.

So I walked in and looked at the screen, which said something like, “Maximum capacity in left tray – empty to resume copying,” and showed a light blinking in the spot where the paper comes out. Sure enough, about 50 photocopies were sitting there. I picked them up, handed them to her and the copier started happily spitting more stuff out.

I couldn’t even look at her and disguise my disgust at the utter brainlessness of the move and just walked out. She’s really a very bright person and very sweet too, but oh, man, this kind of stuff happens all the time with her and about 70 percent of my colleagues.

And while I don’t work with Walmart, I’ve learned that their mail delivery, while completely awesome in the way I can order LifeSavers, is as inane and wasteful as any governmental agency.

Shipping is free for orders over $50, which means every order’s relatively large. My normal order consists of things like garlic powder, the aforementioned LifeSavers and the like (although no more cookies with frosting; I’ve learned that one.) I can also get health and beauty items like toothpaste.

And due to the whole import-export thing, sometimes it’s cheaper to get stuff from Walmart than it is locally, which is weird because the stuff is made in China.

And on a shipment of $50, Walmart will usually ship in multiple packages, because that can be a lot of stuff. Not all of their shipping choices are eco-friendly, though.

I do understand breaking up grocery items and non-grocery items, such as shipping the batteries I’d ordered (not lithium!) from the cans of hash. But those came in a small little padded envelope, which kind of made sense.

Last week, though, I got the coveted “You’ve got a package!” email from my colleagues in the mailroom and ran up to claim a box that was about twice the size of an ordinary shoebox. When I picked it up, it couldn’t have weighed more than a single insole of one shoe.

It was my loofah sponge. A $60 order placed through Walmart, and they sent the $2.22 sponge in its own box. And quite a large box, at that.

And of course, upon inspection of the loofah, I realized it had traveled all that way in luxury conditions (I even got some packets of air) to come back to China.