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NOT LIKELY!
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Who's behind all these
impenetrable packages?
By CHUCK McFADDEN
of TheColumnists.com
Taken out and shot. Lined up against a wall and bang-bang, that’s it. Justice must win out, after all.
Does that sound a little brutal and arbitrary? You won’t think so after you find out who I’m talking about. Vice presidents for packaging at major consumer-goods companies, that’s who I’m talking about.
“Lift tab to open,” smirk the words of instruction on top of the cereal box. As if you could “lift” the tab. You can’t. You’ve tried. It rips, leaving the cereal unattained. You have to get a table knife out of the kitchen drawer to “lift” the damn tab and then slide the knife sideways under the rest of the top. Except that there are no table knives in the drawer. They’re all in the dishwasher, dirty. So you use a paring knife that’s handy. Paring knives are sharp. Very sharp. You stanch the flow of blood, return to the scene of the carnage, and pry up the top of the cereal box. Carefully.
Once you get that off, it’s only even money that you’ll be able to tear open the sealed wax paper all by yourself, especially now that you’ve been maimed. You’d probably be wise to get a pair of scissors. They’re nowhere to be found. Suck it up.
Or take the clear plastic stuff that garden tools and other things come in. If you doubt that we live in an age of scientific miracles, doubt no more. That stuff will laugh at your pathetic efforts to tear it away from the cardboard backing. You discover that what you need is a pair of heavy-duty shears. Except the heavy-duty shears are unavailable. They’re encased in that fortress of plastic. You bought the thing and brought it home, but the package designers are damned if they’re going to let you have it.
Those pull tab cans that beer and soft drinks come in? They eliminate the need for church keys or other easily lost hardware, but watch it. Usually, you get the tab peeled off about 98 percent of the way, but then it clings stubbornly. You give it an extra tug to yank it free. Whee! Beer all over you! Go back to the party looking as if you wet your pants! Smile! Everyone will believe you! Of course they will!
Unwrapping a new CD? Fool. A CD and its package mate for life. But let’s just say, for the sake of discussion, that you marshal all your surgical skills and manage to get the cellophane off. That’s quite an achievement, but no resting on your laurels. You’re only halfway there. Now you must turn the CD this way and that, trying to figure out which end is the hinge and which end you use your fingers at to try to pry it open. Would any packager do something such as printing “Open at this end” on a CD? Of course not. Were they to do that, they would be drummed out of the club.
I will draw the curtain of charity across what you have encountered breaking and entering child-resistant caps on pill bottles. CHILD resistant? What about Old Fart resistant? “Push down and turn.” Oh, really? How about “Obtain flamethrower”?
I could go on, but you get the picture. We really do need to get to the stuff we buy, once we pay for it. It’s only fair. But Fort Knox-style packaging is a sad fact of modern life, like traffic jams and Rush Limbaugh.
Maybe I’m being too harsh, with this talk of firing squads. In fact, justice might be served even better if we could put all the vice presidents for packaging in little cells. We would pump a gradually rising level of water into each cell. Their only hope of survival would be a life preserver, which would be provided. In a package.
©2006 by Charles M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Monday, June 5, 2006.
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