Inertia

For a while I’ve been accumulating more metal than a patient undergoing reconstructive hip surgery. Plans to cease buying things failed in the same way that I never gave up drink for January, never cut down on crisps and how the bicycle remains gathering a nice collection of cobwebs. The resistance to change, the force preventing me from clearing out those mods not seeing use, feels as though it increases the larger a collection gets.

Do mods combine their mass? Do they begin to exert a gravitational pull? I’ve not witnessed drip tips flying in orbit around the vape stand but I’m betting it happens. Probably when I’m asleep and the kids’ toys are playing around the house.

It’s the catastrophising mind-set I have; the worldview that if things go pear-shaped for vaping under the next government I’ll need to return to simple mech-based vaping…this, and the work of the evil vapers who drum into you the need for a backup to your several other backups. Damn you Pop Will Eat Itself, damn you and your “One’s too many, ten’s not enough”!

In March the collection finally numbered over twenty mods. Of that I only tend to use the regulated ones – so what purpose does a collection serve? How many mods turn you from a vaper into a prospective vendor?

One Internet advert later and eleven parcels sat waiting to be wrapped – and now I realise where the inertia to divest the collection comes from. I’m a man, I have man genes…we don’t wrap unless it’s in a gangsta style. My wife’s birthday present was tastefully presented in the packaging a bicycle rack was delivered in, with a side order of masking tape circumventing the joyous gift.

Packing up eleven items made me empathise with vendors across the country doing this on a daily basis. Not just the tedium of fighting tape, tearing skin from lips and slicing into skin with paper but also the worst bit – having to visit the Post Office.

Entering our local mail specialists is like climbing out of HG Wells’ Time Machine. You are flown back to a time where customers are as welcome as children talking in Victorian family dining rooms. The wonder of the modern age is that for most people, most of the time, we can avoid the ritual humiliation of the Amusement Park queuing-style system.

A woman employed for her observation skills noticed something was up. “You have more than one parcel,” she opined, the air now charged as clearly I had contravened the secret first command of posting. Other options were presented to me that included form filling. Exactly how difficult should sending mail be? Meanwhile, in the ever-growing queue, there had been a birth, two birthdays and one unfortunate fatality involving a greetings card.

I may have finally managed to overcome inertia and sell on some kit but I can’t see this happening again in a hurry.