I Can't Open This Damn Thing!

We all have our pet peeves. I know Stennie and I do, anyway, because we discussed them on the Hucklebug podcast not too long ago. And why this one didn't crop up in my list, I've no idea. Because, well, peeves? Yes, it's a peeve, but it's so much more. I guess it just hadn't happened to me in a particularly violent way recently at that time. But it has now, thrice in the past week, and so I'm ready to vent.

I hate the way everything in this country is so fucking overpackaged!

I can remember the first time I encountered this then-new phenomenon. It was round about the time of the Tylenol poisonings, but it wasn't the bottle of red and white pills that ease headache pain. It was something much more innocent. It was a bottle of Crisco cooking oil.

And I laughed. I laughed! Yes, I unscrewed the blue plastic cap off my bottle of Crisco only to find - well, not a gaping hole into which I could stick my eye and see miles of artery-clogging oil, but a little white plastic thing with a loop attached to the opening of the bottle. "Well, what is this?" I asked myself, then pulled on the loop and out popped the little white plastic thing, which was conical shaped.

"Hey! It's a baby coolie hat!" I exclaimed, and put it on my index finger, singing "Chinatown, My Chinatown" and doing my own puppet show.

I certainly didn't know what was to come.

Now, the whole Tylenol thing. What a horrible person, that guy who put cyanide into bottles of Tylenol, thus killing several people and making the world realize how easy it was to tamper with everyday products right on our grocery shelves. On a personal level, the very weekend that happened, it was circa 1982 I believe, I was spending a particularly drunken weekend with some friends in Atlanta, and we basically lived on Tylenol and Alka-Seltzer for three days, so I know I should consider myself lucky that I'm even here.

And OK, maybe it's not such a bad idea to put a piece of aluminum foil on the bottle of aspirin, or encase the top of a bottle with a clear plastic dotted-line tearaway thing that seals up a product for safe keeping. It's sad, but the way things are in these terrible times, well, I guess I can live with that.

But damn. Hasn't it gone overboard.

I wear contact lenses. And goody for me. And as a contact lens wearer, I of course have to buy bottle after bottle after bottle of contact lens solution, sold at ridiculously inflated prices at grocery and department stores. I buy them in two-bottle packs. They come in a box. This box is hermetically sealed on all sides, and top and bottom. So I get the box home, slide my finger underneath the box's seal, sometimes slicing my precious finger, open the box, and pull out a bottle of solution, only to find that - the bottle has also been sealed, with a tight plastic wrapper around its spout.

The first thing that bothers me is that this plastic wrapper is nigh-on impossible to remove. It has no tearaway perforations, and I tug and pull, breaking fingernails and resorting to using my pointy canine teeth (yes, my canines are pointy, just like a dog's or vampire's) which still doesn't do the trick, and so I go to the old standby. The black fine-point pen that sits by my bed. I start poking holes in the plastic with the pen point until it gets to a stage where I can tear the plastic away and begin the business of contact lens cleaning. Which takes some of the wind from the sails of "packaged for your protection," because now the spout of my once-sanitary solution is covered with black pen marks.

And the second thing is that the box is sealed, on all sides, and that's good enough for me. But apparently only me.

At least they're trying to save me from poisoned eyes. But it gets better, friends.

I'm also a Barbie collector. And goody for me on that as well. I will on occasion, though I haven't lately, buy a Barbie in a store and bring her home to rape for her neat shoes or start tearing out her hair and pulling off her head so I can remake her into someone I like better. I open her sealed box, and what do I find? That Barbie has been tied into her box like no dominatrix ever knew how. She has plastic ties around her waist, wrists, and feet. Then, as if that weren't enough, her hair - her sacred Barbie hair! - has been sewn, actually sewn with plastic thread, into another piece of plastic that's affixed to the box. Was it that easy to steal Barbie before? And is she less easy to steal now? Hell, if a Barbie will fit under your shirt or in your handbag, so will her box. I don't think sewing her hair, which after the unpackaging takes on the resemblance of Barbie In A Tornado, is going to help.

Speaking of hair, over the weekend I bought a set of hair thingies. Headbands, I guess you call them. My hair curls like nobody's business, and the heat and humidity of the summer has made it hard to manage. And not-so-goody for me on that one. My four headbands came with a sealed cardboard hanger around them. I got them home and tore open the cardboard to try one on to see if it would in fact tame my hair, or at least tie it up to the point where I could forget about it and get on with the business of living a life. I discarded the cardboard and still couldn't try on a headband. Because underneath the cardboard, the bands were welded together with a piece of sealed plastic wire so hard neither hands nor teeth could unlock them. I had to go for the kitchen knives.

Now, I have an hour for lunch, and goody for me on that, because some people have less, but not-so-goody for me because I wish I had more, for no one can come home, hang at the computer, fix and eat lunch, and drink a horrid Orange Crapius comfortably in one hour. That sentence was long, and I apologize. Last week I received in the mail two brand new big honking jugs of Crapius, of the orange and lemon varieties, and when I arrived home for lunch I set about the task of combining the two flavors together in a jar, as I do, for mixing into another liquid to drink. (It's a strange life I lead, you know.) When I opened my two caps on the two jugs I said, "Shit," because I generally forget about the thick paper affixed to the tops of the jugs.

Paper affixed to a jug top sounds so benign. But you don't understand. This paper is so thick, and is sealed so hard, with nary a tab to pull on, that I don't even try. I go right for the knives again and jab around the circular top until my paper is cut away. And me, being a little anal, you know, I don't want to cut badly and leave paper bits jagging around the jug top, and well, it takes time, you know?

So I did this twice, combined my two Crapii together, and mixed up a drink. Then, I had to decide on something to fix for lunch, which of course I wouldn't have time to eat, but I'd take it back to work and munch on it at my desk. There's a rotating bullpen of three general lunches in Betland: chicken strips you throw into the oven, a skinless chicken breast you throw into the oven, and lunchmeat rolled together like a big meaty cigar and eaten. For this particular day I chose the chicken strips. I opened a new bag of them, tore the tearaway top right off, got out a pan, and prepared to hoist a couple of strips onto it. But I couldn't. Because that new bag I'd just torn the top away from - contained a second bag inside, the one the chicken was in, and it didn't have a tearaway top! It had no opening apparatus at all! Those chicken strips were suffocating in that bag! Thank God for the kitchen knife. Once again, it let those chickens run free, at least till they got to my pan, where they were baked and eaten.

And, folks, this wasn't a random bad day. I didn't just pick the wrong lunch. Because the boneless chicken breasts are also sealed in a bag that's sealed within a bag which needs a knife to open. And the lunchmeat is in a sealed plastic box that, when opened, contains a sealed plastic bag (knife, please!) that holds the meat.

It's a good thing I didn't want a second coffee that day. Because while my coffee has a nice and easy aluminum foil tearaway top, the coffee creamer uses those thick plastic tabless stick-ons just like the Orange Crapius people endorse (knife, please!). Or wanted a mid-day toothbrushing. (Ever squeeze the hell out of your toothpaste tube only to realize that the reason nothing's coming out is because there's a plastic sticky underneath the spout?) Or to touch up my coif with some hair goop. (Same deal.) Or to take a vitamin. (Same deal as with the coffee creamer, only with the added feature of digging past a fist-sized ball of cotton, a practice I've pondered for 40 some-odd years and have yet to understand. Maybe pill companies don't like the sound of pills rattling in a bottle as they pack them into boxes, even though they do that anyway, cotton or not. I know, I've checked.)

I guess what I'm going for here is that if you want to protect me once, fine. Have at it. But please, don't overprotect me. Glue one box, seal one bag, and call it a day. I'm having a nervous breakdown here trying to use your products, Corporate America.

And also, while we're at it, you might want to know that I'm in the 98% majority of folks who don't want to steal your products. Barbies are welded to their boxes, headbands are put in bondage. And how about those products (computer accessories are big for this, and other electronics) that are encased in a clear flat plastic container that - doesn't open! There's no pull tab, no dot to press that releases the package open, no tiny combination lock that you have to go online, set up an account and password, then wait for an e-mail to get the combination to. Nothing. They're unopenable, even with scissiors, because the clear plastic is too hard to be cut by even the sharpest pair. Knife, please! (It's a wonder I still have 10 fingers with all this knife use.)

Then. Then! How about the products that are overpackaged - for no fucking reason whatsoever! They're not theft-proof, and they're not capable of being poisoned and hurting our persons. Who's bought a CD or DVD in the last, oh, 10 years? You've got your plastic shrinkwrap around the item, and if you've lost your little E-Z Slide CD opener for, oh, say, the 436th time, you're left trying to peel it open at one of its corners (knife, please!). And once you've finally done that, you've got what I feel is about the most annoying invention of the last 100 years, besides Viagra, the thick sticky label they put at the top of the CD or DVD case. And in what to me is just plain cruelty, it even has a pull tab on it. It's a tab, and it says "pull!" And it doesn't work! If you can get the tab de-affixed from the case, which of course you can't, it pulls off the tab only, and you're left scratching the rest of that sticky label with your fingernails, having it come off in eight or nine pieces and scratching the hell out of your case. Well, your DVD case. Your CD case just breaks, but it was bound to do that within the first 20 minutes after its purchase anyway, but it still always seems to come as a surprise.

Cookies nowadays come in a sealed bag inside a sealed box. As do the cheese sticks I like. The Fake Bacon I sometimes eat is in a sealed box inside a sealed box. Salad dressings are sealed by paper on their caps, and a good deal of them have the top of the bottle sealed with paper (knife, please!). And the item that started it all for me, the cooking oil, still has the little pull-out coolie hat. However, the blue plastic cap on top is now sealed as well.

Is the general public so dumb that they'll buy something off the shelves that looks like it's already been opened? I mean, if you go out to buy a bottle of aspirin or box of cookies and the box it's in isn't sealed, wouldn't you just look for another one? Would you buy a bottle someone's opened and torn the plastic seal on? Well, I know you wouldn't. You're good people. However - well, I guess sometimes it's just not good to ask a question that begins, "Is the general public so dumb...."

I know what you're thinking. Well, I know what I'm thinking, anyway.

What about shoes?

Isn't it strange indeed that shoes are completely non-tamper-proof? They're just sitting there, in boxes, not tied in, not sealed up. Someone could come up with a powder that could rot the feet of America, and a network of foot terrorists could take one single day in the right stores and render half our nation footless. They could shove little traps in the toes - imagine the pain of losing your big toe simply because you just had to try on that brown suede pump. All I need to do is point out that not too long ago we had a shoe-bomber on our hands. It can be done, people. It could be the downfall of The Security of America.

Either that, or they could come up with an idea that would put knives in stores in that clear plastic packaging that it takes a knife to get into. I really don't see how the country could rebound from that.

I couldn't.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* Acrowinners, we have acrowinners! So, what' going to be the new "Law & Order" this season?
- Honorable Mention goes to Flipsycab, with her "Law & Order: Investigative Physical Education." (And thanks, Flipsy, for the L & O creedo, it was a nice sentimental touch.)
- Runner-Up goes to Stennie, with her "Law & Order: Indigents, Perps, & Embezzlers."
- And this week's winner goes to DeepFatFriar, with his "Law & Order: International Pedophile Escapades." Boy, talk about a season premiere "ripped from today's headlines." That's an episode waiting to happen.
- Thanks to all who played. You've all done very well indeed!