On Pockets

So on the way to Puzzle Palace the other day we’re following one of those commercial vehicles, complete with 27 laborers wedged in the rear tray.

Three of them have been upgraded to business class (they were sharing a sheet of plastic to keep the rain off). One of the other fellers was probably looking pretty clever when they had first set off – as he’d planned ahead well enough to have an umbrella.

His strategy resembled something more like one of Baldric’s cunning plans once they hit the expressway (not only does an inverted, bright orange 7-Eleven umbrella fail to keep the rain off, it also appears to become an uncontrollable weapon of destruction to the 26 colleagues wedged in next to you on the tray of the Nissan Cabstar).

And then I notice the stenciled tag line on the rear of the truck:

“We specialize in building envelope technology.”

Now this really got me thinking. Decorating an envelope I can understand (imagine being the guy who paints those red and blue marks around the edge of those air mail envelopes).

Envelope technology?

Well, sure, those envelopes with the little plastic windows would be pretty tricky to build. And maybe those yeller ones with the string ties that we use to send hate mail to the finance department would require a bit of extra thought.

Surely there is more technology in stamps?

I mean the gummy bit on the back of the stamp tastes way better than envelopes for starters. To be fair, my research on that stopped when I discovered toads.

And stamps have those cute little moon shaped perforations. My 4 year old can build an envelope. He was pretty crap at cutting out those little perforations when I asked him to build a page of stamps – and don’t even get me started on his shoddy effort at making the picture look the same on all 100 stamps. Lucky the Minister of Fun & Finance is a therapist in her spare time ... she should be able to get the boy right again by the time he starts college.

Look, I’m no marketer. But I’m willing to suggest that the envelope building market is under serious threat from those crazy electronic letters used by the young kids of today.

Mind you I’d like to see those young kids send the house key back to the old lady in an email.