Friday, April 26, 2019

I NEED A TYLENOL


Last night I made myself a great looking salad.  I loaded it with a variety of vegetables, olives, feta cheese, croutons, dried cranberries, and topped off with some chick peas.  It looked fabulous and only lacked the dressing.  Popped open the fridge and spotted a brand new bottle of creamy Caesar.  One of my greatest fear now faced me.  What evil or probably stupid thing has the design engineer done to with the bottle to make my life miserable?  He didn’t disappoint.  A paper label wrapped the top of the bottle.  The glue used for this could probably be used to hold an airplane together.  After laboriously removing it, I then easily unscrewed the plastic pour cap from the bottle.  Now even more challenges faced me.  A little piece of plastic now had to be removed by lifting it off using one of three or four tiny little tabs.  Just try and get a grip using a tab that’s 1/8” long.  After screwing them all up without removing, it was now necessary to pull out the heavy artillery, knife and scissors.  Mission finally accomplished, the dressing was now exposed after my usually cursing and blood pressure rise.
I know it shouldn’t bother me this much, but it’s only an example of modern packaging.  You can no longer open things without using some kind of tool.  Even a lousy jar of pickles has some plastic crap over the edge of the lid.  Is someone out there anxiously waiting to PMP (poison my pickles). Blister pack, bubble pack, you name it, every possible means to get us inside those packages.  Even liquids are in containers that need have its plastic top strap broken before the cap can be fully removed.  Happens with wine in screw tops where a ring of wire must be snapped.  Now that’s a real problem, now they’re even affecting my afternoon drinking habit.  I could go on and on with examples of problems with today’s packaging.  I realize that most of this situation is caused by them trying to secure our health and safety, but I do wish the people designing these packages would try opening them and see what we go through. 
Why all this security in packaging?  Blame Tylenol!  Back in 1982 there were a series of poisoning deaths resulting from drug tampering in the Chicago metropolitan area. Seven people died from ingesting Tylenol-brand acetaminophen capsules that had been laced with potassium cyanide.  No suspect was ever charged or convicted of the poisonings.  Tylenol, followed by many other companies began dramatically changing their packaging to make product tampering extremely difficult without making evident any tampered materials.  Since then it’s become difficult to keep the bad guys out and not affect the rest of us.

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