There’s chipboard and there’s corrugate. Corrugate is fluted and multi-layered. Chipboard is single-ply and dense – what’s used on a toothbase carton or cereal box. We would insert a corrugate pad into the calendar prior to shrink wrapping it. This would give the calendar the backbone it needed to keep its shape when the shrink wrap constricted around it, otherwise the calendar would curl up within the wrap. Chipboard was not stiff enough to provide the necessary infrastructure for shrink wrapping.

Despite all of this, somehow, institutionally, we called the corrugate inserts chipboard for as long as we shrink wrapped calendars. At least once, our misdefinition resulted in us ordering chipboard instead of corrugate pads. This is how I know that chipboard was insufficient. Nevertheless, we persisted in our broken speech.

One Saturday during peak season in 2002, when we were up against the shipping cutoff coming in the next week, we ran out of chipboard (corrugate).

More precisely, we ran out of loose chipboard (corrugate). We had a couple of pallets of the soon-to-be-prior-year 2002 calendars that were already shrink wrapped. We were faced with a few options: 1. Wait for a chipboard (corrugate) delivery on Monday. 2. Open the 2002 calendars, pull the chipboard (corrugate) out, and use the chipboard (corrugate) on the new 2003 calendars. 3. Shrinkwrap the 2003 calendar to the already shrink wrapped 2002 calendars.

We made a phone call, and Despair started running a limited-time promotion: Shipments with 2003 calendars will get the bonus of the 2002 Demotivator Collection. And we shrink wrapped the new calendar to the old calendar. Problem solved. (Nevermind the additional weight.)