SEPTEMBER 24, 2021 – To divert myself from worldly woes, I leap to the future when all of earth is scorched earth and “alien” visitors search for evidence that water once flowed here. Then I return to the present for a fresh look at . . . worldly woes.
Take, for example, packaging. Why should we need pliers, knives, and shears to access nearly everything we buy?
Yesterday, I deployed all of the aforementioned to break into packaging. First up: a new flash drive. Regular kitchen shears cut only through the outer cardboard. The plastic composite encasing the flash drive itself was “scissor-resistant.” Only metal-cutting shears worked. Even then, the edge of the cut plastic was so sharp, I needed leather work gloves to protect against self-amputation. Still, the flash drive remained locked up like an ant in amber. After a five-minute struggle involving two sets of pliers, I resorted to a first-rate swear word. Finally, the flash drive dropped from its cage.
Later came a new bottle of salad dressing. The cap was locked in place by plastic wrap yielding only to the most pointed knife in the kitchen. Yet, freed of the outer packaging, the plastic cap refused to budge. With one hand choking the bottle’s neck, I applied the other in a crushing grip around the bottle’s head. No go. Out came the pliers, jaws adjusted to reach around the bottle cap. “Off with your head!” I said aloud.
Yet still no contents could flow. Underneath the cap was a seal with three small tabs, any of which (a person would think) could be pulled to remove the seal. But no! The tabs were too small to allow sufficient purchase. Thanks to pliers, at last the dressing poured.
Next up: a fresh loaf of bread, wrapped in cellophane glued at the end so securely, I again needed the pointed knife. First, however, I had to get inside the outer plastic bag; or more precisely, I had to unlock the secrets of the twisty holding closed the bag. It looked easy enough—simply untwist. To my puzzlement, the ends twisted further, rather than untwist. So . . . having graduated from high school and then some, I twisted the twisty in the opposite direction. Still no go—or as a Millennial would text, “WTF?!”
With a fresh set of expletives I unlocked the code, but don’t ask me how.
And don’t ask me why every single twisty or plastic holder to a bread bag DISAPPEARS every single time it’s removed from the bag. There should be a law: every bread bag twisty/holder must be colored deer-hunter-orange.
Then there’s the new device or appliance that arrives inside a mountain of packaging reminiscent of Churchill’s description of the USSR: “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
Speaking of the USSR, when I was there in 1981, I noticed how people lived free from packaging of consumer goods—and for that matter, free from consumer goods. Only the beverage class—from necessity—enjoyed special privileges.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
