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Shelf Life

I am not going to bore you with a tale about the life of a shelf.  Or describe in gory details (sidebar - what is the opposite of gory - ungory, kali (for those that are multilingual)?)  what material a shelf can be made of.

Rather - I got to wondering what this cliched term actually meant.  When you study 'Inventory Management' (fancy way of saying - where is my S**T or I can't find any of my S*%T) you first encounter this term in its formal glory.

It signifies the time a widget spends sitting on a shelf before its consumed.  Consumed itself has different connotations depending on who is doing the consuming.  So it is basically the life time calculated by subtracting date of use or expiration from the date of arrival (on said shelf).

Physical products like soap, toilet paper, cookies, candy, juice, pens, paper, trousers, computers, phones, cars, aircraft all have varying durations of shelf life defined by how well they can service the end user.  Consumables by definition tend to have shorter lives (either as they get consumed often) or they expire or decay or rot (think bananas on a desk).

White goods - also used by blacks, Latinas and Asians tend to live for around 10 years - think rinse, repeat machines or refridge machines /cold beverage containers.

Music, movies and works of art tend to live much longer lives.  They are intangible in some ways yet seem to linger in people's memories for a while.

Human mind (which is a fascinating item) can have varying degrees of shelf life depending on the said human (mine is already at a point where I almost forget what I wanted to say so have to read my own blog a few times to continue to say something remotely consistent) and can decay at random.

Old growth redwoods (now that is an amazing specimen of nature) tend to have been around for over 4,000 years.  Can you imagine a living thing that was in its infancy when moronic sapiens did not quite have their act defined and then have witnessed with increasing alarm the so called progress we have been making :)

As new concepts like Facebook accounts (there are likely as many of them as there are bananas on the planet), email accounts, et al become prevalent it will be interesting to see whether or not they go the way of bananas or achieve redwood like status.

Comments

  1. Our net contribution to the well-being of the planet may leave us redder in the face than the redwoods. We will not be able to show our face, for fear we may be booked for serious offences in those areas.

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