The Perfect Plan

I had a metal craft die for making envelopes which I didn’t need.

Someone I knew had been doing a lot of work for a group, and I thought she deserved a little surprise. I knew she had wanted one for a long time.

Perfect.

I would mail it to her anonymously.

It was thin and light. A couple of dollars in postage, perhaps. No ceremony, no obligation, no thank-you required. Just a useful little thing appearing unexpectedly in her mailbox.

There was only one problem.

I didn’t have an envelope big enough.

The die was just over six inches tall and seven inches wide. I thought the maximum height for ordinary letter mail was six and a quarter inches, so I decided to make my own envelope.

I cut cardstock to sandwich the die.

I measured. I trimmed. I measured again.

I made an envelope.

I trimmed some more.

Thirty minutes into what had begun as a two-minute act of kindness, I discovered that the postal limit was not six and a quarter inches.

It was six and an eighth.

I stared at my carefully engineered envelope.

It was too big.

At this point, reason briefly left me.

“FINE!” I announced to the room. “I’LL PAY PACKAGE RATE. I WILL GET THIS TO HER.”

That would cost about ten dollars.

Fine.

Ten dollars.

Victory would be mine.

Then another thought arrived.

If the die was more than six inches wide...

How wide was her die-cutting machine?

I checked.

Many standard machines only take dies up to six inches wide.

Oh.

So now I was preparing to spend ten dollars mailing her a die she might not be able to use.

I could ask her what machine she owned.

Except the gift was supposed to be anonymous.

And now that postage was ten dollars, I wanted it to be anonymous more than ever.

Every part of the original plan had collapsed.

The cheap gift was expensive.

The effortless gift had taken half an hour.

The anonymous gift required questioning the recipient.

The useful gift might be useless.

And the lovely little surprise had become a logistics operation involving custom packaging, postal regulations, equipment compatibility, and cardboard engineering.

I finally put the die down.

Half an hour earlier, it had been a perfect idea.

That was the strange part.

Nothing had been wrong with the idea when I had it.

The facts simply kept changing.

And each time they changed, I tried to preserve the original plan by solving one more problem.

That may be how some bad ideas survive for so long. They started out as good ones.

Sometimes persistence is admirable. Sometimes it is not.

At some point, perhaps the correct response is not another solution.

It is to put the damn die back in the drawer.