A LA CART
No argument, the wheel is a wonderful thing and each succeeding generation seems to find a new use for it -- witness those annoying motorized mini-scooters the neighborhood kids are zipping around on.
According to our Dorling-Kindersley "Visual Timeline of Inventions," we have been wheeling things around since circa 3200 BC. So you might think our human brain-trust would have gotten the process down by now.
No such luck.
Off to the post office we went with our little cart, the sticker on which declared boldly it had been rated for 200 pounds of load. OK, so we had books. OK, so we had a LOT of books -- several heavy boxes of them. The sign on the cart read 200 lbs. and there was no way the books weighed that much.
Off we went.
Our post office is only about a block away and across a parking lot. About halfway there the wheels, literally, fell off the cart. Bolts came loose, and the dang thing proceeded to disintegrate all over the lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it could have been worse -- it could have been a rainy day. With that in mind, we began to lug the boxes into the post office, one at a time.
Now postal people never have seemed to us as jovial types, but that day they had a good laugh at our expense. The reason was we had recounted our travails for the people behind the desk. When the last box was weighed, the whole post office staff burst out in uncontrollable laughter.
The total was two hundred and TWO pounds!
We can imagine the response by the cart manufacturer: "Hey, the product performed as advertised, buddy. Maybe you shouldn't have packed that Norman Mailer novel in the last box."
A lot they know.
It was a Tom Clancy.
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