Monday, March 25, 2013

La Scatola

There are few things more fabulous than hard copy mail. 

An envelope in the letterbox is as equally ace as a whole chocolate cake, one fork, and a bottle of full-bodied red á la pajamas. 

So imagine my disposition the other evening when my doorman rang saying there was a FOUR-FOOT package downstairs with my name on it!!! I immediately slipped into my furry mules, flew down then back up the steps of my building, wrapped my chubby fingers around the most accessible sharp object I could score, and tore into the fleshy cardboard with the same primal fervor I recall having 4am Christmas day, 1989.

To highlight just how enormous this box was, I kindly instructed my friend to take a dip inside:




(I would say she obliged, but she's so inspired as an individual that my request instead  manifested as a potent source of pleasure.)



So anyway, the external box was enormous. And inside the enormous box lay another, smaller, medium-sized box...

and then a smaller one...

and still a smaller one...




I may be more greedy than I am an environmentalist, but who really cares when the outcome is the same- an exponentially decayed enthusiasm with each progressively more modest parcel.


Whatever.


I finally reached the penultimate and eventually the ultimate scatola, and this is what I found:



A tiny, glass pastry holder; the same height and width of any quotidian ruler. 


How's that for anticlimax?


I shouldn't be complaining because I actually really like this thingy. In fact, I was the one who purchased it. But because I had ordered it over THREE MONTHS AGO, and because it arrived in a box suitable for a PIANO, I felt in this moment, entirely mislead. 

I guess I will conclude this impressively boring story by saying that the Italian Post is no more transparent than Italian bureaucracy, that they are both unapologetically slow, and that by convention, they mutually dictate the use of excessive amounts of paper that ultimately ends up in someone's trash.




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