Only time for a quick drive-by post this morning.
While fixing breakfast I encountered one of my pet peeves.
So you’re a manufacturer. You seal a bottle — could be honey, could be salad dressing, could be bleach, could be a lot of products — with a thick metallic-paper seal. To that you attach a thin half-circle of plastic film. Then you announce to hopeful product users that all they have to do to open the product is pull the insubstantial little semicircle of plastic, which will magically lift the heavy (and firmly glued-down) slab of metal from the bottle! EZ-peasy!
The predictable ensues. Every. Single. Bloody. Time. (Hint: It involves cutting through the metal seal with a knife.)
This particular pet peeve is a subset of two other pet peeves: containers made impossible to open and makers who have obviously never used their own products.
Yeah, I know none of this matters in the great scheme of things. So sue me. Would you rather have a pet peeve post or nothin’?
Still. Gn&^%$#rrr!
I blame government.
You’ve got some pet peeves, too. I know you do. Have at it.
Oh, there’s actually another pet peeve that this is a subset of: things labeled “easy-open.”
That perforated thing that supposedly exists on deli meats with the resealable strip just behind it. Argh! I destroy the package every time
Gee, I never have trouble with “easy open” anything (well, there was that one woman…)
Re: Foil seals. I really don’t have trouble with them. Do you pull them straight up off the top, or kinda peel back starting at one side?
Gotta love Amazon and their Frustration Free Packaging.
The little pull tabs on foil seals always work wonderfully for me, though. Its the teeny side-tabs that make me nuts.
Sealed plastic packaging “bubbles” that won’t separate to open and are so tough that you can’t even cut them with scissors.
Oh, and automobile oil filler ports that are too short for the oil bottle to reach, so you have to pour the oil through the air and hope you don’t slop too much on the engine (or use a funnel, which then is oily so you need to store it in a plastic bag). All they’d have to do is add a 1 or 2 inch extender so an oil container nozzle would fit right in, but they don’t. Grrr.
Ah yes… indeed. I’ve lived for 67+ years… and the frustration just keeps getting worse with modern packaging. Then again… I have solved a great many of the problems by not buying a lot of prepared, packaged things – especially retail sizes. I buy in bulk whenever possible… and most of those containers are not particularly safety sealed. So, once you have opened the stupid foil seal on the bottle of vanilla extract in the kitchen size, you never have to do so again. Just refill from the gallon jug. You do need a funnel, however. I have lots of funnels.
My first husband bought oil and other automotive fluids of various kinds in multi gallon containers. (“Shade tree variety mechanic) and had funnels for them. They stood in coffee cans marked, “motor oil” – “transmission fluid” – “gear oil” – and “misc.” Never did figure out what he used the last one for. LOL He cleaned them occasionally with gasoline. An EPE disaster zone, for sure.
EPA disaster… I’ve been having fun trying to figure out what government entity would be represented by EPE…
Yes, I have a strange sense of humor sometimes. 🙂
You pull on the tab every time expecting the tab to remove the seal. It fails every time. Next time, you pull the tab expecting the tab to remove the seal, and it fails.
Hmmm, doing the same thing every time and expecting a different result could mean you are weirdly optimistic, or a governement agent…
I just skip the pulling tab part, i know how it ends, and use my knife.
Pet peeve #1618
Modern gasoline cans.
A fine example of gubbmint ‘assistance’.
In the latest snow-ice encounter, I had reason to use all of my gas and diesel containers several times. This includes the ones that are the modern ‘safe’ type…(I haven’t replaced ALL my cans with the good old type. )
Those new ‘safety’ ones spill gas/diesel all over the place, and are twice as slow to pour out their contents as the old ‘unsafe’ type.
I would love to get a statistic on how many people get badly burned by these supposedly safe containers.
To answer your question, I’ll take a pet peeve post over nuthin’.
I have so many knives handy that I never try to “easy-open” anything.
Yes, to many of these pet peeves.
I won’t even use paper towels any more because it’s pointless for what you’d expect them to do. However, I haven’t gotten over being mad about the state of toilet paper now a days. Less everything. And at the rate it’s going it won’t be long before you can place 2 side by side on the holder, too. Which one will need cuz it takes more to get the job done.
Most of the other peeves I have learned to avoid as much as possible. Haven’t figured a workaround on toilet paper yet.
UnReconstructed — Re the gas cans: And here I thought it was just me! Every time I try to use one, I slop gasoline all over the place. I don’t remember doing that with the oldstyle cans, but this time I forgot to blame the gummint!
Wow, I think I share every one of these pet peeves. Who knew I was so peevish?
I notice that, except for UnReconstructed’s gas cans and naturegirl’s TP (yeah, damn narrow little rolls) nearly every bitch is about packaging (and even gas cans are technically a form of packaging). Is that just because I started things off that way? Or is there something inherently annoying about packaging.
Bubble wrap that has to be sliced apart (and is likely to slice your fingers in the process) — oh yeah!
There’s something inherently annoying about packaging. You just reminded us, LOL.
So you want to know about my pet peeves well I honestly don’t have that many. I have to agree with you guys, these little “easy open” things are a pain in the butt to the point where I try not to buy the over packaged “easy open” items that I know will frustrate the heck out of me. These days I don’t even bother trying to get the little foil thingy off without using a knife.
My biggest pet peeve is…
The one that stands out these days in the realm of annoying me are the “meat puppets” in the media. Specifically the weather prognosticators. They like to call themselves weather forecasters however I tend to refer to them as weather-tainers. These purveyors of doom take the simplest of forecasts and turn the events into TEOTWAWKT. The major problem is the fact that the weather-tainers are too wrong to be believed and too right to be ignored.
MJR, you’re weather-tainers hit my pet peeve; calling things by their proper name.
All winter long, weather folk talk about “black ice”. My old CDL manual taught me that black ice is oil on the road, usually found in toll gates and fuel stations. It has nothing to do with cold, snow or ice.
Here on the east coast, we have a phenomenon called a nor-easter. It happens when the winds blow cold, strong and steady out of the north Atlantic and down the coast. Up until Sandy, all the most destructive winter storms at the Jersey shore were winter nor-easters.
Last week, the weather folk told me a noreaster was working its way UP from the Carolinas. Arrgh.
Not really a pet peeve, but an annoyance anyway. Most of my weekly garbage consists of packaging. Mostly of the plastic kind.
I hate it when I ring through to voicemail and have to listen to a recording telling me I’ve reached their voicemail and I should leave a voicemail after the beep – I think we all know how it works by now, how ’bout just beeping so I can leave a damn message?
JW, I never heard of oil on the road being called “black ice”. To me (and I grew up in the northeast) that term always referred to a thin, invisible sheet of ice (generally the result of a freeze after a brief thaw). I’ve used it that way for more decades than I’d care to recount.
Well, for non-packaging related pet peeves, the store clerk who hands you a fist full of bills and coins with the receipt, merely reading what the register display says is your change… instead of counting it out.
So far I’ve managed to teach several young ladies how to count change properly, encouraging them to consider it a customer relations improvement, as well as to avoid errors. They had just never been taught to do that before, astonishing as it is to us old timers.
Oh, another really big one… strangers, over the phone and in person, using my given name without any indication that I would welcome it. I realize that a great many women feel differently about it these days, but I dislike it so much that I tend to hang up on them, or correct those who do it to my face. If they persist… well, there’s not much chance for a friendly relationship, let alone a business relationship.
And we won’t even go into the young snots who would call an unrelated older woman impertinent things like, “little lady,” or other such. Doesn’t happen a lot here, thank goodness, but it used to drive me wild when I lived in Calif.
Phone trees that have no touch-tone option, only voice recognition, and I’m using them from a noisy place. And every noise on my end is heard by the system as an attempted response.
Stupid warning labels, like the one on the outside of the visor in my auto, which tells me I have an air bag (doh) and there’s even more VITAL AIR BAG INFRMATION on the other side of the visor. And I can’t peel them off any more.
And the equally stupid nannies who firmly believe that if a warning label won’t convince me I need to change my diet they need to mandate a bigger, more intrusive warning label.
UnReconstructed, you know you can just buy a
http://ezpourspout.com/wp/ez-pour-products/parts/push-in-vent/
drill a hole and stick it in your new ventless gas can? I’ve seen mention that water jugs still come with vents, and maybe they don’t have the triggered spout. If it’s the same type plastic, it’d work for gas, you’d just want to label it well. I think it’s unlawful to store gas in a non-purpose container. Oh my! Makes me wonder if the size/thread on the water jugs is the same, so you could swap the spout out? Well, or find a replacement water-jug spout. EZ-Pour has spouts too, for that matter.
Lots of variations on that theme exist. Punch a hole and stick a plastic golf tee in it. I’ve read of people using a Schrader valve core without the stem, closed with the cap.
While looking around for that EZ Pour thing, I found a report that Blitz USA had gone out of business. “We appreciate the support of our employees and their families in their efforts to reorganize and develop a viable business plan,” said Blitz President Rocky Flick, according to an article in the Joplin (Missouri) Globe. “Unfortunately, we were not able to address the costs of the increased litigation associated with our fuel-containment products.” But I can’t find such a report using Google news.
Watch this classic with Carol Burnett being driven to blithering despair by a bevy of ‘easy open’ items that ain’t:
One of my pet peeves is when people try to finish my sentances for me. They always get it wrong, then I try again, and they cut me off and try to finish my sentance AGAIN!!! If you knew what I was saying, I wouldn’t have to say it. So just SHUT UP FOR 2 FRIGGIN SECONDS and then I promise you will get your turn!!!!!!
I cherish my old style gas can. It is simple, works every time, and rarely loses a drop of gas. I have a new one too that requires a degree to operate. I curse the government every time I use it, so it’s got its compensations.
My latest car came with a filler neck device that is supposed to allow diesel nozzles and exclude the gas ones, but it also has the effect of excluding all “gas” can nozzles so you can’t fill it from a can. I guess VW got tired of defending warranty claims against idiots who put gas in their diesel cars, but I pulled my “idiot-proof” device out of the filler neck. If I get it wrong some day I will eat the cost rather than trying to blame VW.
How about the passenger-side rear view mirrors with the verbiage, “OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR”, or however that goes? The verbiage which blocks your view of the objects you are trying to see?
Some years ago a bad person put some poison into a pill bottle and put the bottle back on the store shelf. From that time on we’ve been “protected” by government-mandated pill bottles that are near impossible to open. More curses for the government…
Lawsuit avoidance tactics – I miss the old user manuals that contained only the information you needed to know, and nothing more. The user was assumed to have a modicum of common sense; and well, if he didn’t, it was his look-out. Now the user manuals are so full of legalese that you can’t find the information you need to use the device safely! Makes all the sense in the world… Also hate the multi-lingual manuals, but there are better and worse versions of that. The best are separate manuals in different languages, so you simply throw out the ones in languages you don’t know.
I do miss the old days when we weren’t being “taken care of” as if we were idiot children. Fuck the government, and all the bastards in it.
How about the toilets in public places with a flush that is heat-activated? You laboriously position the “ass gasket” on the seat, then when you turn around to sit down it flushes the ass gasket down before you can set your ass on it? When I’ve gone through two or three ass gaskets like that, I start to wonder if I’m on Candid Camera…