By Mark Patterson
Calmly, I sized up the adversary before me. Several protective layers surrounded the targeted internals. Hoping for a quick, bloodless victory, I grasped my foe just above the neck and twisted. To no effect. More determined, I tightened grip on torso and, mustering an old-man strength accumulated over four decades of bench-presses and concentric-curls, again attempted to spin the uppermost extremity counter-clockwise, this time exerting much more force. Still, no reaction. Further, now angry, efforts served only to fatigue me and bring an acute ache to my forearms. My eyes bulged like Marty Feldman’s in some 70’s horror/comedy. Genuinely fearful of a stroke or aneurism, I backed off, shameful defeat now looming not improbable.
But then, as jagged breath returned, I caught sight of the inhuman thing’s secret advantage: some sort of an encircling armor, colorless and transparent, that bound neck and what passed for a head together as one, rendering it deceptively difficult to decapitate. Resolved now to fight smarter, I slipped two digits under that diabolically conceived cloak and first pried, then pulled, for all I was worth. Something gave, just a little. Pressing attack, I yanked violently, sensing the foe soon defenseless and at my non-existent mercy. However, fingers too fat to fully violate my enemy’s upper fortification at length retreated, only to return wielding thin stiletto, a serious weapon scaled to task.
Surely, I now held upper-hand (no pun intended), and renewed hope surged as lethal dagger plunged in. And I might have prevailed, except the Ginsu (perhaps recalcitrant to any task other than dicing fresh veggies for elaborate dishes that you, too, can prepare right at home) slipped and darted straight for exposed wrist. Had the painful scrape burrowed maybe an inch deeper, a vertical slash-the tragically effective kind, for those poor souls with a “goodbye cruel world” agenda- would have resulted.
By then injured, ashamed, and thoroughly beaten, I slunk away from the theater of fateful battle-the granite counter of my kitchen island. There would be no Heinz Ketchup for my (now cold and soggy) McDonald’s fries.
A day or two later, my week-old whiskers, growing beyond trendy scruff, went unshorn when a new trimmer’s encasement proved stubbornly impregnable. I hope that new Bosch is happy in the jagged military- grade plastic that will forever be its tomb. While finger-wagging environmentalists might estimate it disintegrates in a half-millennium, I’m betting that package outlives the big orange ball.
Is it possible to buy ANY product with a container that doesn’t resist or outright battle consumers? “Resealable” purchases never rip open where the little arrow points; the cellophane on snack crackers won’t give way until the exact instant tasty content has crumbled; the fragile arm of cheap reading-glasses wants VERY badly to break on attempt to tug it through some sort of sticky adhesion; the plastic lid on my favorite iced tea refuses to jilt the co-dependent bottle below, and as for whatever substance that a certain brand of low-grade gummies (Hint: we aren’t talking about the ones shaped like bears.) avoids capture in, I sincerely hope buyers aren’t impatient to indulge, because that stuff puts Fort Knox to shame- no matter how persistently they might “pinch,” as directed, the unyielding abdomen of its tauntingly weightless, yet rock-hard container. Surely, that material could be better employed on space shuttles.
I do understand the imperative for tamper-resistant packaging, as lawsuits and recalls have brought more than one corporation to its knees. Plus, they can’t have products laid naked by the rigors of shipping and handling. Nor do we want our “Bluey”-obsessed future presidents chasing juice boxes with belts of Drano. (Please, no cracks about the current commander in chief-this column avoids politics.)
But does “child proof” have to mean Mark Patterson proof? Isn’t that what those once ubiquitous stickers are for? With it now nigh impossible for tykes to do the Socrates thing, Mr. Yuck has abandoned bottles of bleach in favor of the nearest milk carton.
Modern packaging simply KNOWS no surrender. And nobody can tell me the people who design it don’t possess a sadistic streak. A pox on those who devise containers that outwit, outlast, and outfight any human having paid for admittance.
The quaint old adage that you “get what you pay for” has, at least for this consumer, become a cruel mockery. I’d just like to get AT the stuff I exchange legal tender for.
