What a Load!

People accuse me of exaggerating. 

OK, I will admit I am guilty of over inflating the truth sometimes. It is just for the purpose of making a point. It is called hyperbole. It isn't meant to distract from the truth, just to make it more impressive.

Here is something I can't overstate. 

I was talking on the phone with a friend of mine who is a Captain for one of the worlds largest air freight carriers. He flies one of the biggest airplanes on Earth. The maximum overall weight of these monsters, when fully loaded, is around 450 tons.

That is a big load!

Obviously, it is much more expensive to fly freight around the world than to ship it. So, to spend the extra shipping expense, there must be a need to get the cargo wherever it is going in a hurry. So I asked him, what are some of the more interesting things his company is hired to transport?

He was sitting in a hotel room in Cincinnati waiting for his next assignment, and looking out at the sleet and snow coming down sideways in 17 degree weather. He thought about it for a minute and then offered "last week we took 160 tons of condoms from South Korea to Iraq."

Hold on a minute: 160 TONS of condoms? Someone paid for overnight delivery to Iraq for 320,000 pounds of condoms? My God, how many condoms is that? What, at 2 ounces each, that would be over five million units! 

I had to know, how many women are there in Iraq? So I looked it up...there are just under nine million women aged 16 to 65 in the whole country! 

What is going on in Iraq that would require the overnight delivery of enough condoms to cover the activity of half of the Iraqi female population? 

Thats assuming the condoms are being used in the traditional way, of course. 

Oh well, I guess life has returned to some sense of normal since the Iraq war ended. 

This story gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "un-f***ing believable!"