Adventures in transporting giant sheets of Coroplast

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So today, I found myself quite far away from home. On the other side of the town, in fact, and holding a large, white sheet of corrugated plastic roughly 8 feet by 4, or in other words about 2 1/2 times my size. I was standing outside a bus, and the driver was saying “Sorry, you can’t take this on board.”

“But this is my only way of getting home!” I protested.
“I have to think of other passengers’ safety,” he said. “That thing’s too large.”
“What if I rolled it up?” I asked, and tried valiantly to roll the sheet into a tube. It was about a foot wider than my armspan on either side.
“Sorry,” said the bus driver, and closed the doors.

Earlier, I’d had a strikingly similar conversation with an equally unsympathetic bus driver. As the bus rolled up to the bus stop, I’d picked up my giant sheet of Coroplast and joined the line of commuters -

“No, not you.” said the driver. “You stay down there.”
“Me?” I’d asked, surprised.
“Yeah,” said the driver. “This bus is for people, not 8-foot sheets of plastic. You call a taxi.”
I eyed my sheet. “I can’t call a taxi. It doesn’t fit in a car. It’s BIGGER than a car.”
The driver shrugged. “I guess that’s your problem, huh?” I heard a woman tittering as the bus rolled off into the distance.

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And…? How’d you get home? (And did the plastic make it there with you?)

GT

3

I’m going to Bunnings to look for metal office cubes soon, so I’ll post more when I get back.

4

And you think they’ll let you take that on the bus???

5

I don’t know if I can convey this to you properly, but the sheet of Coroplast was really, really huge. My memory keeps shrinking it down, but every time I see it I think “Holy shit, that’s big.” And apparently, it’s mostly known as “Corflute” in Australia, but since I was introduced to the stuff by a website about “cubes and coroplast” cages for guinea pigs, that is what I shall refer to it as.

You may not believe me, but I planned out the journey meticulously, searching out the best price, writing down the directions in my little notepad (kind of important when taking 3 trains and 2 buses, none of which you’ve been on before) and arrived at the store without a hitch. There I talked down the price from $21.85 plus tax to $22 including tax - not bad for something that’s already been discounted. I took my receipt and went around the side.

Where’s your car? said the guy in the warehouse. I didn’t have one, I said. I was taking the bus. He asked if he could cut it up for me. No, I said, it has to be in one piece. I asked if I could have it delivered. It cost $36 - more than the price of the plastic. I said I’d take the bus. Apparently, saying this a couple of times is all it takes to make them knock down delivery to $20 - but no, I was still taking the bus. So off I went.

It was about 700 metres to the nearest bus stop. The Coroplast was like a giant sail. It wasn’t heavy, but the awkward position I was forced to carry it in made my arms ache all the same. After a few metres I thought, screw it, the motorists are staring anyway, and hoisted the sheet up over my head. I walked like this for a while before realising I could turn it to catch the wind, and a-sailing we went!

So anyway, after getting turned away by two buses, I called my mother who called my dad who had to come off work and rent a little metal trailer thing from the petrol station and come pick me up. Meanwhile I spent the hour he took to arrive thinking about how hot it was that afternoon and how I hadn’t had anything to drink since 8 in the morning and weren’t dizzyness and lack of sweat symptoms of heatstroke? Fortunately, a barbecue shop employee saw me and invited me in for a drink of water.

The trailer was too small for the Coroplast and while on the highway it flew up and bunched itself up into a little ball in the corner, after all my efforts to keep it unscathed the kilometre I walked carrying the thing.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, my guinea pig had better be really freaking grateful.

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Oh, and it doesn’t really matter but that sentence should be “Fortunately, a barbecue shop employee saw me and invited me in for a drink of water before I passed out in his parking lot.” Must have deleted it while fixing my paragraphs.

7

I got down to the third paragraph, and was thinking “Perth? March? Daytime? I’d have paid the $20 delivery”. Glad to hear you made it reasonably unscathed apart from crumpled plastic and a (presumably) annoyed parent.

So what the heck are you making? Some sort of Guineapig Palace? Post pictures…