This week I performed some repair work on one of our HD video cameras after the various parts arrived. There were two Sony boxes that made me laugh when I first saw them. Notice in the picture above, the relative size of the little square replacement part to the mountain of packing material and large, square box!

But oh, it gets more amusing from there. This box is about a foot long and two inches or so square in height and length. It contained a bundled section of bubble wrap and –do you see them? — two very tiny little mounting screws!

The collective weight of these screws is certainly less than a gram, but they were in a foot-long box! Not only that, they were also double-bagged in two tiny zip-loc baggies!

I suppose there are some interesting reasons why such boxes are chosen for things, and Sony isn’t the only one that ships us stuff in abnormally large boxes. In this case, it prevented some very small, very important parts from being lost or misplaced due to a tiny box escaping notice or falling into a nook or cranny somewhere. The larger box actually shipped for free since it was a backordered part. It can also be cost prohibitive for a company to stock the right size box for absolutely every possible combination of parts. Still, when something shows up in a box 1,000 times its size, it’s fun to enjoy a good laugh.