Plastics are out to get me!

As I drove home the other day from the grocery store, having picked up a few items – notably three or four bottles of carbonated beverages that were running laps around the back of the car, I began to imagine the type of person or persons that would design those containers. 

Imagine for a moment the “engineers” of those bottles sitting at a meeting discussing all the possible annoying features they could build in.  “Let’s make them round, so that when they fall over, they’ll roll quite a bit.  That way, the soda will be sure to fizz all over the kitchen.”   Laughter makes its way around the table.  “Ladies and Gentlemen, I have an idea.  Let’s taper the bottoms too, and put little pointy feet on them.  Then, they will fall over really easily and knock over everything next to them.” “Here’s a little something I’ve been working on too,” ventures a junior executive.  “Let’s put loops of that new unbreakable plastic around six-packs of bottles and cans. We can work up a deal with the company that makes knives that cut through shoes.” Having concluded a fruitful brainstorming session that is sure to create widespread misery, they break for lunch.  In a perfect world, someone would bump their table and someone’s Cosmo would splash all over everyone.

I get that some products need to be “protected’ from the general population for sanitary reasons, and we’re now obsessively safety conscious and germ-phobic.  I opened, well broke into perhaps is a better phrase, a new roll of paper towel just the other day.  For this, I keep a small wood chisel and a utility knife as those seem to work best.  The way the producers turn the ends over, shrink-wrap the folds, then hot glue them, and add a layer of solder to make sure the paper towel is completely safe is really quite remarkable.  It’s vital that the paper towel is absolutely germ-free and sterile because we’re going to use it later for, well, to clean up germy messes.  I’ve seen a number of folks in television commercials using rubber gloves when using paper towel.  Maybe if every shopper in the grocery store put on rubber gloves upon entering, we wouldn’t need to wrap the paper towel at all.

We apply these same exacting sanitary standards to almost everything we buy.  Pick up a set of screwdrivers at the hardware store and they come in a handy plastic container.  That’s sort of the screwdriver version of a marble sarcophagus from the Middle Ages or British Royalty.  You know the ones I mean, that have a carved figure and creepy face of the deceased on top.   The nice thing is that this plastic is almost as impossible to get into as the marble.  I usually plan the first hour getting the screwdrivers out of the packaging.  The downside is that I usually can’t find the tools I need to get them out of the plastic container, so I have to go get new ones that come in . . .  . oh God, more plastic.

Small light bulbs – can anyone explain to me the wisdom of placing these in molded, absolutely impenetrable plastic casing?  They’re glass, with delicate filaments inside them.  When you buy a big screen TV or microwave oven, it comes in cardboard and Styrofoam, but lightbulbs we encase  in heavy-duty plastic. Over the years, I should think I’ve broken almost as many lightbulbs taking them out of the package as I’ve installed intact.  Thank goodness they come in pairs – that’s probably why.  The one nearest the incision won’t come out alive. I remember seeing a very funny scene from the television series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, in which Larry attempts to extract something from its packaging.  He starts quite reasonably and calmly, and by the end he’s taken a hammer and is just smashing and bashing in total frustration.

I always enjoy doing battle with containers like the ones for cakes and pies. Opening a cake, I just get it around the circle until that last spot, where I apply that last little bit of pressure and the happy moment when it spontaneously flips up, tipping the cake onto its side, causing the frosting to stick to the top.  Sometimes if you’re really skillful, the icing will peel right off in a sheet and you’re left with a naked cake. There are countless lost hours of my life, never to return, spent scraping the frosting off the plastic container and trying to repair a cake that looks like it was in a traffic accident.  Ironically, the one thing we don’t seem to be able to completely seal in plastic is meat.  You’re in the grocery store, pick up that package of chicken parts or a rump roast in that thin cellophane and it drips all over you.  Now you’re standing in the middle of the meat section, fingers all sticky, looking for the paper towel which is four isles over and at the other end, encased in plastic wrap.  The clerk at checkout always asks, “would you like your meat wrapped separately?” because it’s oozing onto the conveyer belt from every seam.  They never have to ask if you’d like your paper towel wrapped separately.  Can’t the people making t screwdriver sarcophaguses whip up a little something for pork chops?  Probably by the time we get the shape just right, the chops are past their expiration date and we’d have to throw them out. Deli meats are the exception here to the plastic problem.  Those are put into nice resealable bags with the handy sliders at the top.  Of course the deli people are trained to fold the bags over and put the price stickers over the sliders so the adhesive gets caught and they’ll jam when you try to open them later at home.

My daughter, who now has a significant relationship with health, nutrition, and fitness, tells me that I should be drinking about a dozen bottles of water a day to properly “hydrate”.  I rather hoped that my daily intake of coffee and particularly wine would cover any liquid requirements, but apparently, not so.  As a consequence, we’ve taken to buying bottled water, which when she’s home visiting, we find as decorative accents scattered about the house. In just a touch of irony, these come in the widest variety of containers, and are more expensive than anything the soft drink or juice people could dream up. She locates these strategically about the house – in her bedroom (in case she gets parched in the night), in the living room – a nice assortment right next to her collection of electronic devices, and on the kitchen counter.  In fact, any flat surface can become a home for a lonely, partially consumed bottle of water.  I get the 16 once bottles because they’re about as much as I can handle in a sitting.  These bottles come in a convenient, tissue-thin plastic that crumples easily when picked up by human hands.  They’re usually filled right to the top and slightly beyond, so when you open them, you have a nice water-feature gushing at you before you can take that first sip.  Often, too, a bottle or two are a little deformed on the bottom,  so they look like mini-Leaning Towers of Pisa in the fridge. And, of course, the bottles alone aren’t quite enough Fun with Plastic, so they come in six, twelve, or twenty-four packs that are hermetically sealed in shrink-wrapped plastic.  That stuff takes about four swings of a machete to get through to the actual water.

Much has been said and written to date about plastic safety containers for all manner of medications.  I can’t add much to that, except to say that the process – push down, twist, repeat a dozen times or more, typically used to open the container will require additional medication for the shooting pains running through your hands and wrists. Ironically, those pills will come in plastic safety bottles.  Is there a conspiracy between the pharmaceutical industry and plastics?   I leave the reader to ponder.

In fairness, we need to thank the plastics people for making many things we use daily lighter, safer, and stronger.  Not only that, they supply every dollar store in America with hundreds of items that we can’t live without and that, when they break, were only a dollar so we don’t feel too badly.  Seriously, these folks also make really important replacement body parts and medical supplies that let us live longer and healthier lives.

So, the next time you run into someone from the plastics industry, someone who is living in a mansion overlooking some highly sought-after body of water or a mountain retreat, with gates and security, who flies in a private jet and owns a fleet of Italian sports cars because folks in plastics make more money that movie stars, make sure you thank them for all they’ve done to make our lives so much more convenient and virtually free of contamination.  I’m going to my therapist now to talk about my stress and anxiety.  My diet soda just went up in a fizz of glory.