Boxing Day

Mr A used to be active and into sports. During his youth, he was a keen woodworker building his own furniture. Since last September, his health and sense of balance deteriorated. First, he started using a walking stick to keep moving confidently. One stick soon became two. When that was no longer enough, he ordered a pair of crutches.

Sevan and Kash found Mr A surrounded by empty cardboard boxes and unopened parcels. Their mission: release the goodies trapped in cartons, flatten the boxes and banish them from the flat. Their weapons: an envelope opener and pair of scissors. Mr A warned the GoodGymers that the tools were very sharp but the blades were already in action. The smell of cut cartons and tape filled the cramped hallway. Sevan was incessantly putting the compressed boxes outside to make space for the incoming wave of new packages to flatten.

A milestone was reached when all the parcels were opened and the GoodGymers found Mr A's new crutches. The cartons were ready to be put away. Before travelling outside to the bin area, Sevan and Kash learned from Mr A that his building had no concept of recycling which was a bit disappointing. When leaving Mr A's flat to bin the boxes, the GoodGymers didn't rely on each other to hold the gate and prevent it from closing, neither they asked Mr A via intercom to open the gate. Instead, they exploited cardboard's potential to the maximum, giving it a second life as a doorstop. Whether it balanced out the absence of recycling procedures, the perpetrators couldn't tell.

When the GoodGymers returned, thinking that the boxing job was done, they uncovered that Mr A supplied them with new cartons to discard. He kept bringing so many of them that he had to take a break. Sevan and Kash repeated the binning procedure only to find more boxes appearing in the hallway. A few polystyrene pieces were a bonus. Sevan went to dump the seemingly last batch of the waste while Kash helped Mr A to make space in his bedroom by stacking his toolboxes on a rack. After that, suddenly, the task appeared to be complete.

Mr A was extremely grateful for the help. He said that what took the GoodGymers 40 minutes would have taken him days. Mr A shared with Sevan and Kash his future projects, including spraying with protective paint and later assembling wooden pieces of a bed and a set of shelves. Is another mission in Northolt soon to be planned? Only time will tell.