Andrews Rants

PACKAGING

I want to go off for a moment on packaging. Somewhere in this world is a school that teaches Techno Nerd Engineers to design and produce the most 'human-unfriendly' packaging possible. Take for instance the PSP2 thingy I just bought for my kid. It came in a box just a tad bigger than a shoe box. When I opened it, it contained Styrofoam to protect the electronics. It had enough of this padding so that if it had been run over with a fully loaded Mack truck I doubt that it would have suffered any damage. I know what you’re thinking, so what, big deal, so it had a protective packaging around it. Well what bright genius decided to pack a sensitive electronic instrument inside one of the most energetic materials known to man for creating static electricity. Styrofoam. When I finally managed to separate the wielded together clamshell halves of the Styrofoam encasing I found an impenetrable shell of hard Mylar casing. You know the type; it’s most often used for things like batteries and such hanging on racks in the supermarket. It is crystal clear and rock hard while still maintaining just enough flexibility to make you think you actually have a chance to physically remove it from your purchased item without resorting to deadly force or a jackhammer. You have to use a knife to cut through this stuff and all the while try not to cut yourself from slipping because it requires Herculean strength to perform this task. You also must take great care to not damage the contents that you purchased that lie mere millimeters below the trembling knife edge. When you finally get the item out of the mass of brightly colored packaging it is barely larger than a paperback book. Now why did they need all that packaging? Was it because they thought that the perceived image of the item costing 200 dollars should come in a larger box. That some people seeing a small paperback novel size package would say I’m not chucking out 2 bills for that but I sure will for this bigger box?? Perhaps so.

Individually wrapped cheese slices are another packaging nightmare.
You get this crisp cool yellow cheese slice out of the package and it is wrapped in a skin tight plastic wrapper. Now this wrapper is like Scotch Tape or packing tape that has gotten stuck down onto its own self and you cannot tell where it begins or ends. You can finger and fondle it for hours scraping a fingernail across every perceived and imagined starting point and still not find where the beginning of the wrapper is. How hard would it be for the manufacturer to put a little dotted line on the plastic or an offset pull tab? In the end you now have a lumpy wad of warm unappetizing cheese like substance inside a crinkly shell of cellophane that is still resisting all efforts to remove it. It has been my experience that at this point if I vigorously curse while wadding the thing into a small tight ball it will cause the free end to spring free. Sure the cheese comes out in crumbled pieces but what else are you going to do.

One of my greatest pet peeves on packaging is medicine. Now follow this scenario closely we have all been there. You have a massive headache and its throbbing through both frontal lobes almost blinding you with the pain. You go to the medicine closet and pull out a new bottle of pain killer. It’s in a small plastic wrapped box that is usually quite easily opened. Inside is where the trouble begins. That bottle is small and has a child safety cap on it. First of all the cap is shrink wrapped with that same Kryptoninan clear plastic mentioned before and even though it often has tear here perforated lines on it they are a lie. It usually takes a sharp object like a Ginsu kitchen knife or Samurai Sword to finally remove it with any effectiveness. Now this cap beneath is all white and has a white arrow to line up with a white notch so that it will pop free. If you didn’t have a headache before you tried to open this thing, you are guaranteed to now as you try to focus on this white on white Rubix Cube puzzle. The simplest way to bypass this ingenious torture device is to get a child who in 2 seconds flat will have it open and ready for use. That’s why they call them child safety caps. Only a child can open them. Now you’re in the home stretch. You look inside the bottle but it’s packed with cotton to keep the pills from rattling around and chipping in transit. It’s packed in there good to, kind of like Sardines in a can. You try in vain to pick it out with your fingers but it’s no use. Fingers are just too big to fit past the constricting neck of this nickel sized opening. All you can do is repeatedly grasp and snag little tufts of the stuff and try to tease the remainder out of the bottle but it always breaks off just as you think that this time you might have it. Now not only do you have a headache and high blood pressure but you’re mad as hell and you need that painkiller. Tweezers are not to be found and nothing in the house will suffice to reach inside and snag the cotton. Finally you loose control and slam the bottle to the floor hoping to break it. With the 'force of your pain' induced throw you do the Incredible Hulk justice yet the cotton wadding still stays firmly in place and the bottle skitters under a table or couch never to be seen again unless you have a small child to send into the stygian depths after it. With a screech and an ever increasing string of profanities you get a butcher knife or some other instrument of destruction and begin to wail away on the offending bottle until structural integrity is lost and pills go spraying across the room. You pick up as many as you need and choke them down with the 'anger induced' bile that is rising and stumble off to bed. Why is it necessary to package something like over the counter pain medication as if it were a weapon of mass destruction? Hell, if all the guns in the world were sold with the same precautions we would never have another war. All of these and many other packaging problems make me want to find one of those little packaging designers or engineers and just slap them silly before dipping them slowly head first in a boiling vat of plastidip.