A Box Full Of What???

I know, as a non-native speaker of Dutch I shouldn't take the piss, but honestly...sometimes they just ask for it. Just outside of our village is a paper recycling depot where you can deliver boxes of...you guessed it..paper and cardboard for recycling. Being conscientious little greenies we are often there doing our bit. The depot is run by two wizened little old men who have obviously decided that a life of retirement with the missus doesn't offer as much excitement as sitting on a hard wooden bench every day overseeing deliveries of old paper which they then chuck into a huge metal container, to await transport by truck to a central depository.

These two old guys are true Achterhoek relics: they must be eighty if they're a day and are faithfully turned out in their wooden clogs and cloth ccaps every time I see them. Only the fat cigar is missing, although this may have more to do with the flammable nature of their business than some moral code.

Anyway, I turned up recently with a car full of paper-stuffed boxes. That's the problem with recycling, isn't it? The stuff builds up into a huge looming pile until you either simply have to deliver it to its rightful resting place or spend half an hour jumping up and down on your wheelie-bin trying to stuff everything in before the rubbish truck arrives.

This day I was feeling quite proud of myself; not only was I about to recycle a months worth of paper junk, it was all packaged neatly into the moving boxes left over from the Big Move from Singapore. I merrily slung the boxes into the metal container until one of the old codgers offered to help. Picking up the first box, he suddenly turned to me and said (in the broadest Lochem dialect you have ever heard and which I can barely understand): "This box is pretty light..it ain't full of Tampax is it???!!"

I swear, the world stopped turning for at least 15 seconds while I absorbed this. Had I understood him correctly? Did he seriously think I would deliver boxes of TAMPONS to him to recycle? What sort of pervert was this? What sort of pervet did he think I was? And what the hell did he think I would say in reply? Before I could gather my senses enough to even stutter he continued: "Lots of people try to pass off Tampax on us, you know. Fill up their boxes, they do. Think we won't notice. I'll just have to take a quick look..." I mean eeeuuuuuuwwww!

By this stage I'm calculating the distance between me and the car and the degree of disappointment he's going to feel when he tears open one of my boxes to discover its only filled with old paper and cartons. The newspaper headlines are flashing through my mind as I back towards the car: "Foreigner killed in tampon rage", or "If only she'd confessed her tampon crime I wouldn't ha' killed da bitch".

Just as my hand reached the doorpost I suddenly had a flashback to my local friend who runs a D.I.Y. shop. From the depths of my mouldering gray matter I suddenly recall that years ago she had explained to me that Tampax was the Dutch name for the foam chips commonly used to package fragile goods when they are shipped - I was safe! The old pervert wasn't really a pervert, just another weird local! With a laugh of relief which bordered only slightly on the hysterical I got into my car and sped away just a little too fast with a compensatory friendly wave to the two local characters. Now that's something I never had to deal with in Singapore!