Sometimes things break. Sometimes they slip through quality control. Sometimes it's just a fluke and a thing that should work doesn't. But then there are those things that have been designed to do something, and they just... don't. They simply don't work. This thought came to me recently as I was opening a box of cookies. It was like many thousands of boxes of stuff that I have opened over my life. Cookies, cereal, crackers, their boxes all have the same design - one side says "open other end," and the other side has one flap with a tab glued onto another flap with a punch-out slot with a tiny note that says "pull here." I always do. I always pull there. And it NEVER WORKS. The top cardboard flap just rips in two as the glue keeps the two pieces of cardboard together. And because the top piece never properly separates, the box never properly reseals. Now, I could see this happening sometimes, what with the automatic glue dispenser maybe dropping a bit too much glue onto the boxtop, or unusual humidity causing some kind of glue foul-up, or something. But honest-to-gosh, these things never work. Think about it - they have a one hundred percent failure rate! Who makes something like that? My mind ricochets all over the place as I contemplate it. I mean, someone actually invented this system and, more importantly, must have patented it. That means somebody made money on a system that fails so spectacularly that it never, ever, works. Second, surely no executive of the companies that sell their products in these packages has ever actually tried to open one. Or worse, maybe they have, and they thought they just got the one bad box. Or maybe they just don't give a crap and are laughing at all the poor saps trying to carefully open their boxes of Cap'n Crunch so they don't rip the top off. I don't know which possibility is the most annoying... And finally, what is one to do? Just rip the damn thing open? Try to make it work by carefully slitting the glue with a knife? Scream?
I hate it when things don't do what they're supposed to do.
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1 comment:
But they say they work, and that's what really works, the fact that you pulled the tab where you were told to pull.
Whether the tab does what it's supposed to is irrelevant, grasshopper.
Pulling where you are told to pull is a successful marketing coup.
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