Accent on Living

Do THE manufacturers who package their products in plastics know their own strength? Are the packages designed to be unopenable? Or perhaps unopenable without tools?

I raise these questions having just bought a nebulizer, for use with an inhalant. The nebulizer itself comes in a readily openable, nay, a flimsy paper box, but its two corks, I found, had been thoughtfully encased in a plastic envelope. Excellent, I mused, as I fished out the envelope, a simple, sanitary way of keeping the corks from getting lost.

Of the struggle that followed with the envelope, I shall spare you the details. About two inches square, it was sealed — welded, fused, melted, or whatever — on all four edges, so I had only to rip it apart. By pulling with both hands as hard as I could, at what coronary and cerebral hazards I prefer not to think, 1 succeeded in stretching the envelope to a length of some five inches, but it remained unopenable, its corks still out of reach. I finally outwitted it by finding a pair of scissors and snipping it to bits.

The inhalant for the nebulizer is equally difficult: it comes in a small bottle whose screw cap is rendered unopenable by an invisible collar of plastic that defies the toughest thumbnail. Scissors are too dull to punch through it, and a certain nail file is the only tool in my own kit to which it yields. An asthmatic, seeking to open one of these bottles in a nocturnal spasm without benefit of nail file, might as well throw in his hand. (As a further bedevilment, the manufacturer tried out for several months a completely opaque bottle in a metallic finish, with the result that there was no way of seeing after a few withdrawals how much of the inhalant remained in the bottle.)

For real unopenability nothing quite compares with a book, a single copy of The Tears with Ross, for example, fondly packaged by its publishers for delivery through the mails. Years ago, some book, somewhere, was damaged in the mails, and the consequent hullabaloo raised by the recipient must have given all publishers an armor-plate complex that has lasted to this day. A book is wrapped as if it were a valuable egg or a Dresden figurine to be dropped, en route, from the top of the Washington Monument. All sorts of corrugated board and insulating materials go into the interior layers of the package, and the whole is then wrapped in a tearproof heavy paper. All edges and chinks are sealed with a wonderful tape which is neither plastic nor paper but against which ordinary desk tools are like a rubber dagger from the joke shop. The easiest way to open a properly packaged book is to use a power saw.

The litter is considerable after the book is finally opened, but a far messier task is opening a case of French table wine. This calls for a crate opener or a small wrecking bar, and prying up the top is only the beginning of the work. Each bottle, one finds, is wearing a kind of paper overcoat that looks much like a tenpin, and all extra space inside the overcoat is stuffed with a malign kind of excelsior as further protection. The excelsior has long been awaiting release and a chance to show its springy qualities, and simply to touch one of the bottles as they lie there in the case is to see bits of excelsior flying in all directions. Eventually, one has on his hands a box overflowing with tissue paper (some of which continues to stick to the wine bottles), cardboard, and stuffings, shedding a trail of excelsior wherever it is carried in the search for a safe dumping ground. The upshot of it all is a major job with the vacuum cleaner.

There is less litter but more exasperation in the simple act of uncorking a bottle of sherry. The owner, on this occasion, carefully centers the corkscrew, turns it all the way down for the maximum grip, wedges the bottle between his knees, and pulls. Nothing at all happens. At this point he asks a more muscular friend to hear a hand. The friend gives a powerful yank and brings out the top half of die cork. The bottom half won’t come. There follows: business of chipping at bottom half with ice pick, poking the remains down into the bottle, and straining the sherry into a decanter (a funnel is also needed), a slow interval because the cork gets in the way.

Unoponability is here to stay, no doubt. It protects whatever is inside from all that is outside, including the ultimate consumer. The perfect package has been achieved. What remains is for some farsighted designer to add the built-in rip cord, the self-ejecting feature.