How you know you have too many cardboard boxes in your house

When you empty another cardboard box, you add it to the pile in a sort of reverse-Jenga style.

If the pile maintains its overall appearance and behaviour, you have succeeded. If it doesn't, and (say) collapses in a spectacular manner, It Is Time To Take The Recycling Out.

(Glasgow only recycles a limited amount of things; you can recycle junk mail, and paper, and magazines, but not envelopes, and although the council will recycle glass, you have to take your glass to the council yourself, you can't chuck it in your blue bin. Savignac-les-Eglises recycles pretty much everything; they also ask you to take your glass to somewhere else, but Savignac is as rural as you get, i.e. you need a car to do anything, so it makes sense for them to ask you to move your heavy and bulky stuff as part of a trip you'd make anyway.)

On a vaguely related note, my company sells a range of servers, named after various types of metal (UK servers: Bronze, Silver, Gold; US servers: Copper, Iron and Steel). I was thinking today that a really badly-advised set of names for really cheap servers would be Paper, Card, Papier Maché ;-).

As it happens, Cleodhna and I had a very enjoyable brainstorming session a few months ago, when the company was looking for names, trying to find a reasonable set of four (as it was at the time) names that had an obvious progression. We came up with a few semi-decent ones, but also a few really, really bad ones. I think my favourite theme was the swearword one: Piss, Shit, Fuck, Cunt. Work's internal IRC channel kept itself amused for all of 15 minutes with that one; unfortunately (?) I kept no transcripts.

Edit: Spammers got interested in this post for some bizarre reason, so I've disabled comments.