Desire for amusement won over desire for sustination. I flicked it.
But I ate the vinegar soaked chips.
What gets me is why do they have tamper-evident seals on bottles of bleach? What on earth can someone add to the bleach that isn’t going to be immediately noticeable and still hazardous? Ammonia - it’ll blow up in the factory. Anthrax - just more dead sinkies* in the bottom of the bottle.
*Sinkies - any macroscopic (or microscopic) debreis in a fluid. Other classes of contaminants are swimmies and floaties. Usually when swimmies die they become either sinkies or floaties.
I HATE the packaging that the two-packs of Lexmark printer ink comes in, when you buy it at Sam’s Club. There is no safe way to get into this kind of package. It’s many times larger than the boxes containing the cartridges, and you have to cut across it to get an opening. Then you have to cut downward to get at the bubble, but by this time, the exposed edges of the plastic are sharp as razor blades. Last time I bought ink, I got a large, deep gash in my thumb from trying to pull the plastic apart far enough to pull out a box of ink, when it refused to cooperate. Couldn’t they put individual boxes of ink behind a counter, and just have you go there and ask for two of them? Or at least include a chainmaille glove?
Exactly, I have a old pair of Fiskars knock off scissors that I use for this task. Once you resign yourself to cutting the bejesus out of the packaging, it really gets a lot less stressful to open.
CD/DVDs still suck because you can’t just go hog wild with common cutting implements.
This probably won’t make the OP (or other contributors with the same gripe) feel any better, but the adhesive title strip that’s used to seal (American*) CDs is at least a little better than those annoying silver ‘nose-strips’ they used to use and more environmentally friendly than the cardboard ‘long boxes’ they were originally packaged in.
*From my experience, neither Canada (nor Europe) use the adhesive title strips on CD packaging. (I guess it’s supposed to deter those young, loose pants wearing hip-hop thugs from shoplifting the discs without the case :rolleyes: ) It’s another one of those little niceties on comes across when travelling abroad – like being able to walk up an escalator without people blocking your way
About the only useful thing I ever got from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” was the tip on opening CDs - dragging them against the edge of a table (has to be a flat edge and not a rounded one, for obvious reasons) is perfect for snagging a hole in the plastic without damaging the case.
DVDs are truly the worst. I got a shipment of DVDs the other day; I was half hoping that because they were a mail shipment, perhaps they’d be packaged differently (I know, they’re all packaged at the same place, but still, I can hope). The LOTR discs were all wrapped with slightly loose, easily openable overwrap, without the little extra tape at the top or bottom. Beauty. The rest had at least 1, but mostly 3, sides taped up with that stupid “Security Device Enclosed” tape. Oh, with the little “Pull” tab. What a sham. You pull it, and it just tries to pull the plastic sleeve from the DVD case off. Finally, you coax just enough purchase under there to lift it up. Pull - fast, slow, hard, gentle, it doesn’t matter - and 2/7ths of the way through, it breaks off, leaving you with 4/7ths left to get off neatly.
DVD manufacturers are evil. EVIL.
Someone referred to cereal bag seals. It seems to me that back in the day I could pinch both sides of the bag and the top would tear right along the seam so I could pour out my Honeycomb and what not.
Now, when I try to do the same thing, most of my Presidents Choice organic corn pops end up spread all over the kitchen.
It seemed like a good time to make eggs.
You have not experienced true packaging pain until you have weathered at least one Christmas full of things like the Barbie Fun Wash and Comb Your Fluffy Kittens at the Playground Set. Or whatever it was called. 127,342 individual plastic creatures and accessories with their every protuberance wired, bolted, stapled and/or sewn to heavy card board. Plus a 50 page construction booklet, wordless, with arrows helpfully pointing to bits vaguely shaped like the ones spread out before you.
Then you get to put on the damn stickers.
Explosives. That’s the answer. If not applied to the package, applied to the designers of said packaging.
Failing that, a big honking knife! 
The point of those adhesive title strips on the tops of CDs is so you can identify them from the top. Otherwise, you look down on a row of identical clear tops. (I worked in a record store during the big change over from long boxes. At one point, I had to rip open every long box in the store and get the CD out.) The security sticker is either stuck to the plastic or, nowdays, it’s often under the CD tray having been applied at the factory.
And Miller is right, popping the hinge is the way to get the sticker off easily. Just be careful, the hinges are fragile and, on some double Cds, they don’t just pop open. Also, the easy way to get the plastic off is to run the corner of the CD along the sharp corner of a counter.
The “proper” way to open these is with one of those utility knives with a retractable razor blade. You extend the blade so that only the smallest corner is exposed, and then happily slice around the item. Usually, I just slice through three sides, leaving the fourth to act as a little plastic hinge.
Using this method, I can have most items out of the package within a matter of seconds, without totally destroying the packaging in the process.
And if you want to return the item because it was defective, they usually want it in the original package, but HELL NO, because you had to destroy the package to get the damn thing out in order to find out it’s defective!
Elroght, whe mivad ull thi viwuls an my bruan?
The last item like this I bought was a CD player. Nothing short of a horde of light-saber weilding Jedis could open the damend thing.
Oh yeah, I totally forgot about the medicine! Yeah, the VERY FIRST thing I want to do with my medicine when I’m miserably sick is fight to get it open. I have no kids or pets that’re going to eat it (if my turtle gets out of his tank, him eating medicine is the least of my worries!), so why do I have to fight it? People tell me there are non-child proof bottles around but I have never seen them in the grocery store and I refuse to go further afield to look for them. Give up the convenience of having them in the grocery store?
Another one who hates those annoying welded plastic packages. Worse, we don’t seem to have a pair of scissors in the house that can deal with them properly (Dad, can I borrow your blowtorch? What about the wire cutters?). And of course everything even the least bit electronic that I’ve bought in the last five years comes in that now too. It’s a $10 gameboy light, ferchrisakes!
And I hate hate HATE the stickers on DVDs. Can’t peel them off, can’t cut through them with my nails. The plastic wrapping is getting harder to open with your bare hands as well, though it’s still manageable. Or am I just getting old and feeble at my young age?
I’m thinking I should just start carying a pocketknife in my bra.
This situation struck home with me recently after I shattered my left elbow trying to hop a fence. (Don’t ask). Since I am left-handed, I had to buy an electric razor to shave with. (Didn’t feel comfortable wielding a sharp blade with my right hand.) Of course, the electric razor came in one of those perma-seal plastic containers that is impossible to remove with two good hands, let alone one. I tried for a good 30 minutes to get the wrapper off before I finally succeeded. :mad:
I can’t get into my graham crackers. After a few minutes of peeling at edges, I thought I was smart and got a steak knife out.
No luck. Guess my knives are dull.
Resorted to the rabid weasel method and had to eat them all.
Kitchen shears. Get a pair of good ones. You can hack up a chicken with them too. It’s much easier to open those damned molded plastic welded things - you just cut all the way around, just inside the weld. You will never look back. Kitchen shears are amazing.
Huh? I open CD packaging with just my fingernails pretty easily–I just stick my nail through the wrapper where the front cover meets the hinge part*, rip the wrapper off, then peel off the security strip. Granted, using a CD opener is faster, but the fingernail method is still quite doable.
- I dunno how to really describe this well. Look at the front of the CD–on the left-hand side, the leftmost centimeter or so is formed from the same piece of plastic that makes up the back of the jewel case, and then there’s the seam where the front part of the jewel case meets it. Stick your nail through the wrapper into this seam, then slide your nail along the seam to cut the wrapper.