Dear Calculus Student,

You will no doubt be relieved to hear that, except for Victor, everything went amazingly well. I saw my darling again and had dinner with her, and I've gotten to see her occasionally since because of the storage boxes I'm going to have made. There's something a little confusing about these boxes, by the way; perhaps you'd be willing to help me.

But no doubt you want to hear about my darling Philomena first. I showed up for our appointment with the check for $7,950.14 in hand, and was greeted by the very vision of my dreams. Her eyes were like green gleaming marbles. Her hair was like a corrugated tin roof after an early fall rain, the kind of rain that comes on those cool mornings after an indian summer, not like the kind of rain that comes at the end of fall when all the leaves and sticks get stuck in the gutters. This was my Philomena, radiant in her khaki miniskirt and hot pink tank top, the woman Gus Gusterson so rightly encouraged me to wait for, lo, all these dozen years.

I had written a poem, a labor of many long evenings, and I had that in my pocket with the check. I will share it with you now, so that you can understand the depths of my anticipation before this meeting.

Dear Luminescent, your Myron S. sent a cardboard box to thee. Now love eternal At every turn 'll be standard stocks for me.

With Philomena The grass is greena. Willowby My bride? As one, we'll cower In tawny bowers pillows three by our side.

You see the raw power of these lines? I particularly like that haunting and evocotive phrase, "In tawny bowers". You must let me know how much you like it. Philomena has not seen it yet.

I told you that when I saw her, I recognized her as the vision of my dreams. I could tell she recognized me, too, and had long waited for our reunion, because as I came in she looked (oh so coyly) down at her wrist, and then said in a voice raw with emotion, "Well, geez, it's about time you got here!". She missed me, I can tell.

I reached in my pocket to get the poem and the check, but my hand shook so that the latter fell and fluttered away in the breeze. A large, older, beefy man darted after the check with remarkable agility (given his size and age), and after recovering it, carried it back to my lovely Philomena. "Looks like we're paintin' the town tonight!" he said to her, in a tone that I considered overly familiar.\

Philomena turned her green gleaming eyes on me, and said in a voice that conveyed ever so much gratitude, "Well, thanks a bunch, Merton. This'll do us up fine. Oh, by the way, this is my fiance, Victor."

Now, I'll admit that this was a bit of a set-back in my plans for future life-long happiness. Certainly, Philomena could not be married to me and engaged to Victor at the same time. But instantly I saw that the situation was not as bleak as it might otherwise appear. There was that telling slip with my name ("Merton" instead of "Myron"); no doubt she was under great strain now that she realized this horrid mistake she had nearly made in preparing to throw away her happiness with a man named Victor. What woman would marry a man named "Victor", really? I realized then that it was my job to rescue her from his clutches.

Rescuing her from his clutches turned out to be a tricky task since (no doubt in an effort to appease him) she seemed at first completely unwilling to have anything more to do with me. After a few desperate conversational gambits, to which their only reply was, "Well, I guess if you LIKE that sort of thing . . . ", I finally caught their attention when I brought up my wise old mentor, Mr. Gus Gusterson.

I mentioned Mr. Gusterson, as I said, in an attempt to pull Philomena into conversation, but the effect of the name electrified Victor. He whirled on me with surprise and shock. At first, I thought he was about to pound me into the ground flat enough use my body as a hallway rug, but he caught himself and instead gave me a wide, sunny grin. "So you knew old Gus, eh?" he asked.

Before I knew it, the three of us were heading out to dinner together. Philomena didn't seem to happy to have Victor tagging along (or maybe she was still overwhelmed with emotion for me), but Victor spent the evening pumping me for stories about my old times with Mr. Gusterson. Victor claimed to be heading for the hardware business himself. I felt all along that there was something he was driving at; something he wanted to ask me but wasn't quite sure he knew how to ask.

By the end of the evening, somehow I had agreed (I'm not quite sure how it happened) to have Victor handle the contract to make all my storage boxes. The idea is that you can stack these boxes, which will hold screws and nails and other small pieces of hardware, and there's a hole in the front so that customers can reach in and get what they need. Here's a picture of the box.

Figure 1:  The storage box, assembled.

Each box is fairly expensive to make, so I'm looking of course for the cheapest way to make them. The iron sheeting costs a penny per square inch, and the soldering (to hold the edges together) is eighteen cents per inch. I tried playing around with the best dimensions myself. After a while, I realized that the cheapest boxes are the ones that are too small to hold anything! But the boxes need to hold about 486 cubic inches of supplies (that works out best in terms of stocking and restocking).

Here's a picture of the box before it's assembled. Because the soldering is so expensive (18 cents an inch!), I've marked the parts that get soldered in darker lines.

Figure 2: The storage box before assembly.

We need to make the boxes 12 inches deep, so they fit right on the shelves, but I just can't figure out how high and wide we ought to make them. Victor says we ought to make the boxes 6 inches wide and 12 inches high (so that the hole is symmetric, and the part on the bottom is equal areal to the part on top). I don't know about this.

Victor's been bugging me about this. On the one hand, I think I'd like to handle the contract myself, especially because it just seems that this isn't the cheapest way to build the boxes. On the other hand, when Victor comes over to the shop to bug me, he brings Philomena.

If there is a better way to choose the dimensions of the storage boxes, could you send me something that would convince Victor that you're right, and that he couldn't get something even better than you? (I don't want this to go back and forth for years, after all).

Yours most confusedly,

Myron Sopher

P.S. What do you think we ought to name our kids?