Shirt Pins

I had to get some new dress shirts this week, which meant that I was subjected to the ordeal of navigating the gauntlet of packaging the use for those things. It’s not enough to wrap them; it’s not even enough to stuff them with plastic and cardboard to preserve the collar shape. No. They have to put little pins all over the place so that wrinkles don’t appear, because evidently that would create an abomination out of what once was an innocent shirt. So first of all, you need to be sure you find all the pins, because if you don’t, you’re going to get poked by them later. And even if you do get them out, what are you going to do with them? You could throw them away, at the risk of someone else getting poked before they reach the landfill. But I have a hard time throwing away something that’s made of metal and technically is still capable of the functionality it was designed for. After all, people use pins, right? Well, seeing these new pins join the existing ones on my wife’s hand-made pin cushion, I had to admit that there are probably more pins there than anyone in my family will ever use. So I guess we’ll just be stuck with these dangerous artifacts of the process. Someday, in the distant future, I hope that someone will find a better way to package shirts. It would mean so much to the world.