I grew up in the 60s when “Take Your Pick”, hosted by Michael Miles, was the best quiz programme on television. It was my mother’s favourite thing to watch on Saturday evenings. Depending on how much she coveted the prizes, Mum would pause the ironing and loudly, repeatedly, urge the contestant to either take the money or open the box. We all joined in the excitement – Nell would answer the general knowledge questions, I would stop sketching and chew the end of my pencil, Annie would dance about shouting whatever my mother’s choice was. Contestants needed to get three right answers and then they could choose a key to one of the ten boxes within which were cards saying what had been won – three boxes had booby prizes, 6 boxes contained good (by 1960s standards) prizes and in one box was the star prize, usually something like a small car or a family holiday. One of the boxes also contained the key to Box 13 – that might offer something like an expensive household appliance or it could be something utterly useless and unwanted. The urbane Mr Miles would offer the contestant increasing amounts of money to not open the box. You can only imagine the disappointment when someone accepted, say £10 only to find that the door opened to reveal that the prize would have been a holiday for four in Blackpool or similar. Such a result would have Nell burying her head further into her book until her intellect was required again and me going back to drawing tiny people with an increasingly short pencil while Annie and Mum laughed at the unfortunate loser, demonstrating that schadenfreude was alive and kicking in our front room.
Now that’s fixed in your mind, let’s carry on.
Box 1
I don’t usually do Black Friday deals and I don’t usually buy from Amazon but last year my laptop died a death just when I needed it most and just when I didn’t have time to go proper shopping. I ordered online. Between it leaving the Amazon depot and being delivered to me, someone had ripped the box open box then taped it back together. I told Amazon I wasn’t accepting the delivery, they said ok, I took the box to the post office, Amazon said they had received it in their returns centre and I’d get a refund in 14 days, max. Six weeks later and after multiple interactions with Amazon’s Chatbot, I finally spoke to a human. “What,” he asked, “do you want to do? Take the money or have another box?”
Box 2
Next the printer had a meltdown. I had learnt from the Amazon experience and went to Argos for a replacement. It turned out that the only way the machine would print was by me standing next to it, holding the power cable in the socket at the back. The novelty of doing that wore off quite quickly so I took the printer back to Argos and explained the fault to an assistant. He picked the box up and threw it to the floor behind him where it landed with a loud crack of shattering plastic. “What,” he asked, “do you want to do? Take the money or have another box?”
Box 3
In last year’s fundraising for Crisis, Mickey the Teddy Bear was adopted by a nice woman who lives quite a distance from me. Mickey was packed into a box and Evri was paid to deliver him with 48 hours. A week later he hadn’t arrived. Now when I say that Mickey’s new owner is a nice woman, I left out the bit that she’s also formidable and more than a match for Evri’s laissez faire attitude to delivering boxes. After a month of her hounding them, Evri declared Mickey as “irretrievably lost”. The bereft owner and I decided to take the compensation money and donate it to Crisis. On Evri’s website, I entered the tracking number into a claim form and up popped a photograph with a chirpy caption saying “just delivered by Janet at 12.29pm! Leave a review for Janet!” So, on this occasion, we didn’t get the money but opened the box to find that Mickey was not lost at all.
Box 13 – Utterly useless and unwanted
Tuesday. Annie staggers home from her morning doing voluntary work with a very large box. A printed label on the side says “Chilli Flavoured Mini Rice Crackers. 20 kilos. Product of Taiwan.” Underneath the legend “BBE 24/11/25” was scrawled in black felt pen.
“Don’t start,” warns Annie as I get ready to remind her that we don’t like chilli or rice crackers, that we grow our own food and buy local produce so 20 kilos of ultra-processed crap that has travelled from the other side of the world was never going to find its way into my kitchen and that the box contents are already two months out of date. “No-one wanted them,” she says. “What was I supposed to do?”
I could have come up with a whole range of answers to that question but instead decide to open the box. Surprisingly it really was a box full of Chilli Flavoured Mini Rice Crackers rather than a box full of individual bags of Chilli Flavoured Mini Rice Crackers. I spend the next hour filling 20 food caddy bags with stale Chilli Flavoured Mini Rice Crackers and the hour after that washing my hands in hot soapy water in a desperate effort to get rid of the smell of Chilli, the orange crispy bits of rice that have got stuck under my nails and the grease which is coating my skin.
Epilogue
If you’re ever asked to take your pick, unless it’s a lost teddy bear, don’t open the box. Especially if it’s 20 kilos of Chilli Flavoured Mini Rice Crackers from Taiwan.