: get me superman, i’m thirsty :
September 19th, 2011 § 4 Comments
Have you bought anything lately? I have. And I’m still trying to get it out of the damn package.
Unbelievable as it sounds, opening a package used to be a breeze. Little kids did it, unsupervised, there wasn’t any skill involved and the only danger was a papercut. You’d yank open a flap or tear off a cellophane wrapper and remove your newly purchased item — bada bing, bada boom. That’s all there was to it. The whole thing, beginning to end, took six, seven seconds out of your day.
Now you need twenty minutes and a toolbox to break into a package: scissors, x-acto knife, welding torch, and the jaws of life. The other day I bought a flash drive (or jump drive or thumb drive) online, an itty bitty thing. When the package arrived, this little gizmo was entombed between oversized sheets of welded, reinforced, rigid, impenetrable plastic. I tried to get it out, I did. I twisted and pulled and pried, I banged it on the countertop. I even channeled Zena the Warrior Princess. Nothing. In the end, I had to pull a knife on it, a really sharp knife. It would’ve been less labor intensive to free Timmy from the old well.
It’s not just flash drives, either. Try to open a CD / DVD. There’s the outer wrap and an airtight seal and a puny pull-tab that breaks at the halfway mark and, yes, more adhesive. They make it so freaking complicated. Dismantling a bomb, on the other hand, takes no time — snip this wire, snip that wire, done (or boom, whatever). Even something as mundane as a cold drink puts you to the test. Try to open a bottle of Coke sometime, one with a twist-off top. It’s capped tighter than the Gulf oil spill. You’ll need Superman to open one for you. Why?
Eggs, with their brittle shells, sit in thin styrofoam cups under a flip-top. Delicate and fragile as they are you’d think they’d merit some type of protective packaging, but no. A curling iron with a steel barrel, that’s what needs sturdy, bullet-proof packaging. Seems bass ackwards to me, but what do I know? I can’t exhume my new digital camera from its vault.
Copyright © Publikworks 2011.
Oh my gosh – oh my gosh! Never have I put the thought of thin-shelled eggs surrounded by limp cardboard together with a stainless steel curling iron protected by the Ft. Knox of plastic. This is HILARIOUS!!!
And, I really like the fact that you said ‘bass ackwards’.
Preach it, PW! Preach it!
Hi, Lenore, I’m tickled you like it. There’s no other way to describe it but bass ackwards.
hehe again you hit the nail right on the head =) You know, you should train Bart. Mc Quietschy is a master in unpacking stuff, especially when he is not supposed to unpack certain thing. The funny thing is, he does not have any problems at all to get things out of the box/bottle/whatever. Conclusion: things might be bullet-proof but for sure not Mc Quietschy-Proof
Do you think he’d get my camera out of the package for me?