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Packaging

The Source

There is, somewhere in the Qinghai province of China, a little old lady poised over her glue gun, and she hates me. I suspect her to be about sixty but looks much older due to her 18-hour shift of sniffing hot glue and cementing tiny packages destined for the United States. For my own peace of mind I need to personalize things so I’ll call her So-Stuk. So-Stuk probably took the job to support her worthless husband, No-Go, and her fourteen grandchildren in their little Chinese village of Stik-Fast. So-Stuk is the gal who’s in charge of gluing, cementing, bonding, and perma-sealing everything I try to open. I’m telling you, So-Stuck hates me. I’ve come to recognize her particular gluing pattern in each carton, package, bubble-wrap and container I try to open. Just to irritate me and emphasize China’s growing eminence as an economic superpower, she puts the words “Easy Open Tab” on each package. I try to be nice to people. Really. I once took one of those personality tests on the back page of a Sunday supplement and the results testified that I was prone to compromise, to pacify, to get along. The category of “plays well with others” wasn’t listed in the Perry Elementary School report card, and it’s a shame. It might have taken the attention away from my actual grades. So what did I do to get So-Stuk so royally hacked off at me that she causes me to wrestle nearly every piece of packaging to a bloody draw on my front carpet? How can it be something I said when we’ve never spoken? Cookies! For God’s sake cookies made in Battle Creek, Michigan, are being shipped to So-Stuk in the little village of Stik-Fast in the province of Qinghai, just so she can heat up her little death ray and plaster the package so securely that when I finish unwrapping the snacks the only bit of packaging still intact is her “easy open” dab of glued cardboard. In the old movies they often used the word “inscrutable” to describe the Oriental mind. Believe me, So-Stuk is “scrutting” me at every conceivable turn. Just when I’ve come up with a new method of opening packages…dipping them in scalding water (bad idea with the new watch), microwaving them in olive oil (need to order another set of business cards), or blasting away at them with a .22 rifle in my backyard (no, I don’t get baby chicks in the mail), So-Stuk comes up with an even more powerful adhesive and I’m left with the old throw-back of stomping the package to death. This works for power tools from Amazon.com but the cookies seldom survive as anything other than a pre-squashed topping for banana pudding. Even something so simple as a bottle of salad dressing…. So-Stuk “scruts” me. What could possibly be so vital in a bottle of Paul Newman’s Non-Fat Ranch Dressing that it requires packaging able to withstand a nuclear blast? Come on, So-Stuck, gimme a break! Paul’s dead. He’ll never know. After first hacking my way through the “peel off here” plastic strip around the bottle’s neck, I’m left with a secondary level of ranch dressing protection after I’ve removed the cap. This little gimmick (no doubt conceived by So-Stuk’s worthless husband…I’m truly growing to hate that man, suspicious that it’s his indolent ways that are putting his wife into such a foul mood) consists of a plastic tab sticking straight in the air with the implication that if you pull it this way or that, the final cover will come off. It doesn’t. Instead, I must stick the tip of a steak knife directly down through the cardboard shield and into the dressing. I’ve done this twice without damaging my hand. Perhaps it’s misplaced envy. Perhaps So-Stuk once heard her mother’s tales of the rich Americans living in plush mansions surrounded by low-fat salad dressing. Maybe this is her method of getting back at my country for what they’ve done with Chinese buffet restaurants. All I know is that the woman has it out for me. I wrote her a letter of complaint, pleading for her to ease up for the sake of American-Chinese relations. I lied and told her that I have no use of my hands since I’ve sliced off all my fingers trying to cut into my salad dressing. My letter lies unmailed. I bought a new box of envelopes and I can’t get it open.