As another hurricane races toward the shores of Creepon Beach, we here in Mount Perry prepare for the storm and remember, only three years ago to date, when Yodar Hoopelhoffer, the Mount Perry town idiot, launched his ill fated Blister Paper Packaging operation.

This is the stuff made with two sheets of plastic file with little plastic bubbles sandwiched in between them, the stuff annoying little kids love to play with and pop.

Yodar had set up a packaging business here in Mount Perry to facilitate and expedite sending our packages out of Mount Perry, across the fifteen miles of morose swamp that surrounds our beloved town and on to their final destination. In theory the idea seemed quite sound and oddly enough Yodar was actually making some money with his project.

The idea was to fill the bubbles on the blister packing material with Helium, instead of just ordinary air, thereby reducing the weight and making them easier and cheaper to ship. Yodar’s first effort, doomed to failure from the beginning, was when he filled the little plastic bubbles with Hydrogen.

Static electricity on the sorting line caused the Hydrogen to ignite and all of Mount Perry did without mail until a new post office was built. During this period, Yodar remained in seclusion, supposedly working on an answer to the exploding gas problem. Those people who normally make their living in the mail order business said, Yodar was in seclusion in an effort to avoid them.

In theory, this was a great idea and right from the beginning, Yodar was actually getting money back from the post office.

Some of his packages actually weighed less than nothing. When the package was weighed at the post office, the scale registered a negative weight. The post office bases their postage on the weight of the package. If the package registered a negative weight the post office had to give Yodar money to forward the package for him.

Some of his larger packages actually needed to be tied down to prevent their floating away. This problem was not experienced with smaller packages because they were immediately placed into bags with other mail. This of course caused the bags to weigh less than they should have weighed and the post office was able to save money on trucking. This was a win, win situation for all concerned and Yodar was hailed as hero of the day for his idea, once the exploding gas problem was overcome.

As Yodar’s service became more popular there were some other minor problems the Post Office should have seen as harbinger of things to come. Some of the mail carriers trucks began to float when the mail was put into them. There was also the problem of those older type steel mail boxes floating away when too much mail was placed inside them.

Naturally, the words “Mail Drop” had to be removed from the Post Office’s official language. The words, “Mail Repository” replaced it. No one really cared, no matter what the terminology, it was a place to put outgoing mail.

Still, people were saving lots of money and in many cases being paid by the post office to handle their mail. Yodar’s business would have seemed to be a wave of things to come, until that fateful day when the storm hit.

Every once in a very great while a hurricane gets past our beloved mountain and the winds in Mount Perry accelerate to speeds of 15 to 20 miles per hour. These devastating storms play havoc with daily life in the streets of Mount Perry.

Naturally, with winds like this, any vehicle without ballast stones in them, but had a quantity of Yodar’s blister packing inside, would have had some great difficulty staying on the groun.

Realizing this, the post office mandated each truck in their yard carry at least 100 pounds of ballast stones or broken concrete in their trucks at all times. A weight station was installed at the point where the mail trucks exited the post office parking lot to make sure all the trucks had a positive and not negative weight.

Unfortunately, this was at just about the time, Yodar got an order for several hundred miles of his blister packaging material and this order was to be shipped air freight from Mount Perry to somewhere in California. He worked all night long making the blister packaging material, wanting to get the order shipped before an impending hurricane struck and shut Mount Perry down for the duration of the storm.