Wednesday, May 16, 2012

A Large Glass of Whine, No Cheese

My telephone is once again working, although the nice tech who came out to fix it this morning has no idea why it is or why it wasn't working in the first place. In any event, I was without a phone and internet service for about 20 hours. I was not happy.

Admittedly, that is probably a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but those minor annoyances have a habit of mounting up, of distracting one from the proper enjoyment of life, even if that life involves a lot of battles. And I've been noticing that those annoyances have in fact been mounting up. After the telephone incident, I went to the market for a few essentials. It turned out to be a major production, especially when I got home.

Packaging: the guys who dream up this stuff should be tried for crimes against humanity.

Now I'm old, but I do still shop. My hips and knees are fine, but my fingers, eh, not so much. It's harder for me to do fine manipulation than it was even five years ago. I understand "child proofing" such things as aspirin and drugs, but for someone with arthritic fingers and no children, I'd like to be able to open a container of a pain reliever without having to line up arrows (which are NOT real visible to someone with presbyopia) and then prying the cap upward away from the container, only to find a piece of foil superglued to the container. Would it hurt for the market people to have a section for products clearly labeled "Non Child Proof"?

And some items, designed specifically for elders and/or those with serious health problems to assist in weight gain or maintenance, i.e., people in a weakened condition, should come in containers which will open without the use of pliers, screwdrivers, and hacksaws. Yet they aren't.

But it's not just health products which are difficult. Packaging experts have found ways to stymy opening something as omnipresent as cereal. Surely even healthy, young, vibrant thirty-somethings must get annoyed at trying to open the wax paper bag inside the box of Kellogg's whatever. It has been heat sealed to keep freshness in, at least that's the theory. Look, that cereal is gonna have a bunch of milk poured on it. It's going to get soggy. Many of us want it to get soggy. Let us get into the damned cereal without having to wrestle the damned bag to the floor.

OK. I feel better.

Now, back to the real battles.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

don't even start about blister wrap.

4:13 PM  

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