I Need a Desiccant.

My office is humid. My air conditioning unit works, but it's still humid in here. This is problematic because I keep lots of envelopes in my office. I'm talking thousands of envelopes. In fact, I just looked, and I have about 20,000 envelopes in my office at this very moment.

When I assembled a mass mailing today, I had some issues with my equipment because the humidity had made my envelopes a bit puffy. I already put in a work order to have my air conditioning unit looked at (because, in theory, it's supposed to pull the moisture from the air), but until that happens (my guess is that it will either happen tomorrow or January, but not anytime in between those two dates) I've been thinking of ways to remove the moisture from the air.

My first inclination was a dehumidifier. That would probably work just fine, and would be a very reasonable solution. It is also a very boring solution. So then I thought, "hey, what about those tiny silica gel packets you find in shoe boxes?"

I mean, I can visualize my office as being just one large shoe box. In fact, the dimensions are quite similar to those of a shoe box. Minus the windows, of course... Anyway, I decided to do some math.

If the formula to find the volume of a rectangular prism (such as my office, which is kind of big) is as follows:

side 1 x side 2 x side 3

that would be 12 (width) x 22 (length) x 11 (height) = 2904 cubic feet. If 2.4 average shoe boxes occupy one cubic foot of space, then I would need 6969 shoe boxes.

And logic would dictate that I would need one silica gel packet for each shoe box, or 2.4 for each cubic foot, I would need the same number of silica gel packets to get rid of the humidity in my office. Or at least to bring it down to the level of the average shoe box.

So, who wants to go try on shoes with me tonight? I need about 7,000 silica gel packets.