Safety Fork, the

I mailed a package today. It was fun; I should mail things more often.

Their smallest box, eight inches on a side, was about twice as tall as I needed, so I took out the tiny knife I keep on my keychain, hacked the box in half, and taped it back together. I’ve done this a couple of times before, but I still get a nagging feeling that I’m about to be told off by the staff for chopping up the merchandise before I’ve paid for it. If I just gave up and walked, they’d be five or six dollars short—they can hardly expect someone else to buy half a cardboard box and a partly-used roll of tape.

But the guy at the counter complimented my ingenuity, once he figured out why I was trying to pay for a box he didn’t recognize as something they sell, and he gave me a break: since I was sending priority mail, I could apparently have used their tape for free.