Open Sesame

One of the greatest inventions of all time has got to be childproof medicine containers. You know, the push-and-turn caps that prevent young children from accessing harmful drug medications. What I don’t understand is why packaging for everything else seems to be adult-proof. Case in point: brand new music compact disks, otherwise known as CDs.

Have you ever tried to open those without the use of a knife or scissors? It is next to impossible. I’ve bought a music CD and immediately wanted to listen to it in my car. Removing the plastic wrapper with only your hands is like trying to crack open a safe. This might explain why CDs are going the way of the 8-track tape. Sure, it might have to do with the fact that everyone downloads music onto MP3 players, but I think it’s because no one can open the darn things. That brings me to products that are hanging on store shelves but encased in those sealed hard plastic wrappers.

I bought a USB jump drive the other week. It was entombed in one of these clear container wrappers. For the life of me, I could not open it with my bare hands. If this contained a heart defibrillator and I was having a heart attack, I would be dead as this packaging renders it totally unaccessible.

But my biggest peeve about this has to do with food packaging. The other day I had a craving for some bacon. Luckily we had just bought a brand new pack, so I took it out of the fridge and heated up a frying pan. Now bacon is wrapped flat between two sheets of plastic. You need to peel the two sheets away from each other, kind of like how you open up a newspaper. My first obstacle was getting a finger grip on each of the two sheets. There’s a little tab area that says, “separate here,” but it’s sealed together so tightly that my fingers were nearly bleeding from trying to pry it apart.

I decided to use brute force, and without any warning it went from zero to 60. I pulled both sheets apart, but it propelled the bacon up into the air like a slingshot. The bacon landed on the floor and our dog Buddy pounced on it like he’d just won the canine Lotto.

I guess I should be thankful that these packaging guys don’t do the fly on men’s trousers.