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Last Word: Snap - Or How Plastic Packaging Can Snap A Mom's Patience
by Nancy Zintak
October 23, 2007
When you have your blood pressure taken, you can hear when the pumping reaches its optimum
level of 170 – that's when the peak blood pressure is reached and your heart is actively squeezing
and beating out blood.
Another way to measure your blood pressure doesn't require any apparatus at all. It's quite
simply a little indicator that goes off in your brain and sounds something like: "Snap." That's
what I do when confronted with plastic – in any form. Plastic will be the thing that turns me into
a serial killer.
I spend my days in the purgatory of punishing broken plastic ... much like Dudley Moore in
the alcoholic tour de force, Arthur. Arthur breaks a cheap plastic napkin holder and after several
hilarious attempts at repair, throws up his hands and says in a drunken slur, "It's a gonner..."
Enter the vegetable drawer on my $3,000 refrigerator; it lasted exactly seven months.
Designed to showcase all our fresh organic produce, the "produce crisper door" suddenly broke. I
kind of rigged it back in place, but the next day it snapped off again. This began to prey on my
nerves as each day the gleaming "produce crisper door" would snap off again and again.
One busy day as I searched in vain for a simple red potato, off it went again. Snap. I ripped
the nonproduce- crisper off its cheap plastic hinges and smashed it into little shards of shiny
broken plastic. Which I then recycled. Now all my embarrassing brown lettuce and shriveled ginger
root and slimy months-old spring onions are laid bare for all to see.
Another snap-inducing plastic is Oscar Mayer's deli turkey, packaged in a delightful
"stay-fresh reclosable package!" The reason the turkey stays fresh is because the package is
hermetically sealed.
When one attempts to "open at the corner," the result is reminiscent of the Chinese torture
of having bamboo jammed under a fi ngernail. Same result with the turkey: if you somehow get your
thumb to separate the sealed corner of the "stay fresh" package ... the impervious plastic jams up
your thumbnail, which usually causes a short blackout.
The next reasonable step is to approach the "stayfresh reclosable package" with your kitchen
scissors. Yet the density of the stay-fresh plastic is such that mere kitchen scissors are hardly
up to the test. So you reach for your yard clippers, and somehow sever a corner off the package,
which you then attempt to separate, only to infl ict a gashing deep wound in your fi ngers because
the dense stay-fresh plastic is now a jagged sharp mess from your yard clippers. And you still
can't get to your shaved turkey.
Snap.
Finally, there's the universal remote control and Polly Pockets. NASA and Homeland Security
have had a hand in this package design. Unlike the stayfresh turkey, this packaging is
impenetrable. The manufacturers somehow seal a dome-like piece of resin that is then scored
permanently to a thick piece of cardboard housing the remote control and /or Polly Pockets.
But the fi nal insult comes if and when you manage to open the plastic dome on Polly Pockets
as your child eagerly watches. You are then faced with more than 500 tiny plastic-covered wire
twist ties, which affi x each and every toddler-choking toy to the aforementioned cardboard. It
takes three hours to remove the Polly Pockets.
Snap.
