Image Credit: Compilation/Jennifer Stahn

I had to buy a pair of scissors this week so I could trim the cat. My scissors came encased in an impenetrable cell of hard plastic that could only be breached by scissors. Three days later they are still taunting me from inside their impermeable plastic fortress, while the cat remains disgracefully unkempt.

Somewhere in a cave in the desert there is a colony of bearded boffins whose sole purpose is to invent fiendish wrappings to prevent us from successfully using the products they contain.

Whose stupid idea was it to put liquids in paper boxes? It is impossible to open and pour a carton of apple juice without squirting it up your arm. In what way is this helpful? Milk boxes trick you with simple-sounding instructions like “lift for spout” and when you’re done tearing off little strips of paper you end up with a jagged hole which means that no matter what angles and velocities you experiment with, milk can only ever run down the outside of the box onto the floor and never into your tea where it belongs.

Saran wrap sounds like a brilliant idea, because it sticks to itself. In practice it’s completely unusable, because it sticks to itself. Which means that whenever you try and wrap a muffin you end up with a squishy little ball of wrap and an unwrapped muffin. And why is it that the boxes Saran wrap comes in always fall apart? You’d think the people who make packaging would know how to make packaging, but no.

Jars are now made so difficult to open you have to buy a tool, a sort of handle with a rubber loop attached, to help get into them. It comes encased in hard plastic. So you have to use a hammer instead, a procedure which in my experience never ends well.

And then there are those wretched “safety seals." Like most annoyances that use “safety” as their excuse, these are an ineffective method of mitigating an infinitely small risk, in this case that some nutter has contaminated your comestible with something unpleasant and dangerous. Like schnapps. Because it may have happened once, somewhere, long ago, we are all supposed to spend the rest of our lives struggling with multiple layers of prophylactic packaging while basking in the warm glow of security that comes from being protected from a threat that doesn’t really exist.

Whenever you think you’ve successfully breached the defences and acquired access to your product, another seal presents itself, crouching, ready to break your finger nails. Yesterday I bought some bleach for keeping my underthings bright and discovered beneath the bottle’s tightly wound cap one of these stupid “safety seals.” In God’s name, why? Who is going to contaminate my bleach? And with what? Food? After ten minutes of squinting and picking at it I went to fetch the scissors.

— The Grumpy Old Git thinks kids should have safety seals to keep their mouths shut. And perhaps for his bladder.

News from © iNFOnews, 2014