Packing Tape Puns

I've heard mixtapes are romantic

My boss' 7 year old daughter came to work and ran up to me with this one:

"You're under arrest!" "For what?! You have no proof!" thinks to herself before running to get box packing tape "I have the security tape right here!"

👏

Back a few decades, I was working in a program with a local college in the Middle East.

The name of the program for ExPats has the clever acronym of "IDEA" (hey, I said it was clever); which stands for "Inter-Departmental Educational Adjunct". It's interdepartmental because my particular specialty not only covers field geology but also paleontology and a bit of archeology thrown in for good measure. Everyone hopes to have a good IDEA...

ahem...

Well, we saddle up and head for the Dune Sea out in the west of the country, where the Precambrian, Cambrian, Silurian, Cretaceous, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene crop out and access is relatively easy and non-injurious.

Well, we caravan out, some 30 Land Cruisers, Nissan patrol, and the odd Mitsubishi Galloper strong. We all get our maps, compasses and split up into 5 or 6 special interest groups ("SIG's"); where each IDEA has his own GPS and LIDAR laser ranging apparatus. Reason being, that there are very few benchmarks out in the desert, and even those are constantly at the mercy of the shifting and ever-blowing sands.

Since we're split into groups and at any one time, ranging up to and including some 50 km2, when a real find is located, a device called the "DIME" (Digital-Interface Monitor Encoder) is attached and programmed into the GPS for location later; it is a digital sort of low-frequency transponder, developed from technology used by offshore drillers and jacket setters where benchmarks are even more transitory.

The way it works is rather simple. When something is to be marked for later retrieval, a series of wooden posts are pounded in a triangular manner around the find and the DIME is set, programmed with the GPS and attached to one or more of the posts.

That's the theory, at least.

Everything works well, especially all the hardened electronics and computer gizmos, but attaching the DIME to the stakes is the real problem. It can't be nailed, screwed or fastened with any sort of metal contrivance as that farkles the magnetic field and causes all sorts of goofy spurious signals. Zip ties don't last long in the heat and duct tape is right out. Many sites have been lost to the shifting sands this way.

Velcro doesn't work too well, as the sand fills the hooks of the receiving piece of velcro and soon renders it useless. String or fishing line work, but that's temporary (they melt). Glue or mastic are out as these are supposed to be temporary. Even plastic sleeves don't work due to the heat out

I was helping my daughter pack her car today, getting ready to leave tomorrow morning. She had a set of plastic stacking drawers wedged into her car, but in getting it there, it had come apart some, so we had to take it out to tape it together better. There was a black plastic bag leaning against it, and in all the wriggling, the drawers tore a small hole in the plastic bag. After taping the drawers, I noticed a small piece of the black plastic stuck to the drawers. I took it off and tried to give it to my daughter, saying, "Here's your hole," but of course she didn't want it, so I put it (you see this coming already, don't you?) in my pocket, and said, "Now I have a hole in my pocket." Her eye-roll was hilarious.

(Does anyone else remember a similar bit from the "Yellow Submarine" movie?)