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FEATURE

More complicated than

you think

By Fred H. Olin, M.D.

One day this spring my wife and I attended an event that in-
cluded box lunches for participants. The marching band I play in
did a short parade and a concert for “Spring Fest” at the Univer-
sity Health System’s Clinic on 36th Street near Highway 90. We’ve
done it for several years, and it’s always fun. There are games and
rides for kids and various “mascots” from the theme parks, H-
E-B, etc., that show up. There are educational materials about
health care for the adults, some other music than ours, and every-
one seems to have a good time.
Anyway, we got the aforementioned box lunches when we were
done, and my wife and I decided to take ours home and eat them
there. When the boxes had been emptied of the sandwich, chips,
fruit cup, cookie, plastic wear and little foil packets of condiments
I got to looking at mine and realized it was really pretty compli-
cated for a “simple” box. Since we had two of them, I carefully
pulled mine apart and spread it out. The pictures with this note
show the box closed, then opened up and then the spread out as
dismantled cardboard. I can just imagine a committee consisting
of a designer, an engineer, a machinery company’s rep, a printer
and the box-maker all working together to produce this little gem.
It’s an intricate piece of work that has to be cut just so (with min-
imum waste), printed, folded, glued, stacked and packed for de-
livery to the ultimate user. It makes corrugated board boxes,
simple rectangles, look primitive by contrast.
This little adventure has caused me to pull apart a few more
unusually-shaped boxes that have come our way. For example,
if you get the 13-bagel deal at Einstein Bagels on Mondays, they
come in a box that is a truncated pyramid with integral carrying
handles. It too is a clever bit of design and production.
So, I challenge you to take another look at the stuff of life that
we all take for granted: I’m continually amazed at the ingenuity
that surrounds us.

Fred H. Olin, M.D. is a semi-retired orthopaedic surgeon who tries to
understand what’s going on around him, and occasionally succeeds.

32 San Antonio Medicine • July 2018