Pamphlet Overdose

            You can tell when you’ve had a good road trip.  The car is waist deep in pamphlets, brochures, and multi-page booklets.  Most of them have bright blue and green covers, and they’re slick with eye-popping glossiness and sugary fingerprints.  You need a shovel to get them off the car seat before you can get back into the vehicle after each pit stop. They plaster the windows.  They stand in for blankets when the air-conditioning gets overzealous.  If it’s been a particularly long trip, chances are it’s safe for you to disable the airbags.  You will have plenty of printed materials to cushion you in an accident, and they won’t inflate aggressively and break your nose.  Plus, you’ll have something to read while waiting for the ambulance.

            Up until yesterday I always took all these brochures for granted.  They’re a pleasant part of the travel experience.  Every stop has a giant rack of them and they’re all free!  On each trip we do the same thing.  We collect mountains of pamphlets.  We scoop them up by the pound and stash them in plastic shopping bags all over the car.  After a few days they choke the map pockets, clog the centre console, and obstruct the air conditioning.  We once threw away the car manual to make room for them in the glove compartment.  On our last trip the spare tire required a crowbar to rescue it from a pamphlet wedgie. 

On a trip several years ago we descended into mad hysteria - no room left in the car!  Drastically, we decided to leave an entire bag of pamphlets in a recycling bin in Michigan.  Six hundred miles later we discovered that five Barbies and their entire wardrobe were nowehre to be found. The rejected bag of pamphlets was still with us.  Not everyone saw that as a silver lining. 

             Regardless of where we go, we grab booklets on all manner of tourist sites, from Disney World to Dollywood to the Japanese garden located in a goat farmer’s abandoned outhouse.  Even though we now travel without children, we nab pamphlets on backyard zoos and flakey reptile houses.  Our collection includes pamphlets on how to apply Jiffy Tattoos and still others that invite you to a session on The Private Life of the Button Mushroom at a one-room science centre.  I really didn’t need a set of instructions for that last one, but I was worried I might be missing something. 

            Most nights during a trip we hoist bags of brochures into the hotel room and spread them out on the bed.  Then we ignore them.  They’re kind of like unsuccessful models – pretty to look at, but ultimately tedious to engage.

            You can even get gobs of brochures for places you’ve never visited.  Just check any tourist site on the internet.  You can print out pamphlets such as Transporting Your Didgeridoo, Panhandling on the Alaskan Panhandle, and Where to Eat on Everest.  

            Recently I wanted to get a brochure printed out for an upcoming event.  It seemed to me that a colored, double-sided, one page fold-over would be quite inexpensive.  I would request plain paper, nothing too fancy - just a splash of color here and there.  How much could it possibly cost?  A few pennies per copy?  I would get a hundred of them, maybe even five hundred! 

            I called around.  Cost per double-sided sheet:  approximately one dollar!  My brochure would be spit out of a colored photocopier one page at a time, and every time the machine muttered “kachunk” it was going to cost me a buck. 

It made me think about the boxes and filing cabinets of pamphlets and their kin that lurk in the back of our garage.  I’m harboring a gold mine!  Had I realized their value, I would have taken way fewer of them.  Or maybe way more.  I definitely would have been more conscientious, less of a pamphlet junkie.  I would have balanced things out better by placing one used pamphlet into the display rack each time I took out a new one.  How else are people browsing for tourist attractions at the Arizona Tourist Bureau going to know what time the ferry leaves for PEI, or who’s up next at Branson?  Isn't recycling our civic duty?  

I’ve already packed a suitcase full to take with me this summer.  I’m also trying to figure out how to get rid of all the weird ones I sent for but no longer want.  So...just how do I send something back to the internet?