Hey, Lancaster OH is not the absolute worst…At least it didn’t used to be. Oh, never mind, it sucks…
Brendon Small
That’s ind of the point, though. I don’t need or want that information—not when it’s in my home. And when I’m in the store I don’t look for the info on labels, I look for information on signs standing over the apple bin. I shop a lot at Whole Foods (which I trust to the point that I assume everything is fine), and they have signs for each type of apple, banana, etc. Once that stuff is in the grocery bag, I have zero need for any info that might be on those stickers.
I’ve had some luck getting blister packs open without cutting myself to shreds with a can opener (the old hand-crank kind). It doesn’t work with all of them, but when it works it works.
Black and Decker’s Power Scissors get the job done, too.
In Korea, we have these great cereal boxes that fold over on themselves after you open them and fasten down. It’s really hard to explain, actually, but it makes cereal storage a lot easier.
My biggie is the placement of the tp in quite a few disabled accessible public restrooms. Here, they have a nice, large stall (one used for the baby changers as well in most cases), hand rails, a high set commode and the tp mounted in such a way that you have to just about stand on your head to get a good handful.
This speaks of just installing the items that the ADA requires and not of the practicality of actually using them.
The PLU stickers aren’t too bad on most fruit and veggies, but I can never seem to take one off a pear or other thin skinned fruit without removing a little bit of skin with it. (the fruit’s, not mine 
)
But as Rick said, the cashier does need the information. Those apples you brought up: are they Braeburn, Fuji, Jonagold, Jonathan, Red Delicious, Granny Smith, Winesap, or another kind? Are they organic? The oranges – Temple, Seville, Blood, Navel, Valencia, or other? Organic or traditional? Pears: Seckel, Bosc, Red Anjou, Yellow Bartlett, Green Anjou, Comice, Forelle, or other? Organic?
Every sort of produce that you buy comes in a number of varieties, many of which look very similar to each other – or in the case of organic, identical to the non-organic variety – and the cashier needs the PLU sticker to know what they are. A personal pet peeve is customers who take great pains to find only produce that the stickers have fallen off of, then can’t answer me when I ask what kind of tomato they are trying to purchase (vine ripe? Ugly Ripe? Beefsteak? premium?) and then get mad when I can’t necessarily guess.
As a new auntie, years ago, I suffered the indignity of fighting that devil packaging while the children, hopped up on holiday sweets, demanded their new toys unencumbered. By the time whatever toy I was struggling with was freed from plastic, cardboard, tape, umpteen twisty ties and teeny rubber bands corraling fake hair, they were long gone, focused on unwrapped presents still left. So I’d set that one aside and yet another imprisoned toy would be thrust in my lap. Ho. Ho. Ho. sob
That was one Christmas. The next one, I got wise. No way was I gonna spend all morning cursing Mattel while everyone else enjoyed watching everyone but me open gifts. No, I decided to endure that particular hell days before with a nice bottle of wine. All gifts for children were opened, freed of excess packaging, batteries installed, shoved back into their original packaging (if possible; if not, other boxes or bags were utilized), and then wrapped, bowed, and tagged per usual custom. Come Christmas morning, kids ripped open their gifts to find that they could immediately tear the braids out of Barbie’s hair and redress her. There was almost no delay between a child’s “AWWESSOOMME!” and the moment the remote control car slammed into dad’s shin. These were much happier times.
I only wish my in-laws had picked up on my ingenuity. I still ended up fighting excess packaging (though not for my gifts). New rule: you buy it, you pry it (open).
What really gets me these days is copy paper. Used to be, a ream of paper was bundled in heavy stock paper. Tear open, fill copier, done. For some reason, heavy stock paper just wasn’t good enough (why?!) and now Georgia Pacific sends us reams bundled in shrink-wrapped plastic with industrial strength glued ends. There is no tearing the ends open without an implement of destruction (I need to put some scissors in the copy room). The plastic will not tear easily, so getting to the paper is an exceptionally unnecessary struggle.
Would it have been so difficult to add a strip to pull on (a la cigarette packaging) to rip open without scissors? If it is too costly to do that, I beg GP and all other paper manufacturers to PLEASE go back to paper paper wrapping. There was nothing wrong with it to begin with.
God, yes. It’s a constant thing, wondering exactly what arrangement I will meet in a strange bathroom. I don’t use a chair but am short enought that I’m pretty much at the same height, and if I can’t use it I’m quite sure somebody in a chair couldn’t.
It’s the little things, like the hooks to hang your stuff on. Would it kill them to put those somewhere farther down the door of the handicap stall? And wouldn’t it be safer in general for them to be farther down anyway? I’m not really a fan of putting my stuff on a strange bathroom floor, but 90% of the time I have no choice even when I am in such a stall (which I normally don’t use). It’s stupid.
And towel dispensers. AAAAAAAARRRRGH! There’s nothing like water running down your arm while you’re trying to reach up over your head to get a fucking paper towel. Yep, it’s no wonder I usually just dry my hands on my pants, because those I can reach.
Yes! And whatever happened to those little spring-loaded flipdown trays for setting down stuff that can’t be hooked on a hook? It’s not like you could really forget your keys there because you had to have enough weight on those things for them to stay down. A book or package worked just fine, though.
I, of average height (5’6"), wholly agree with you because although I can reach them, by the time I get ahold of the towels I end up having to dry much more than hands and, if long-sleeved, now my cuffs are damp. Damn you, eight-foot-tall bathroom designers!
Ha, I have you all beat in terms of bathroom design. Somewhere in Europe (I want to say it was in France but I forget), I went to a little museum. I went to the bathroom. The stall doors had… slots. Slots for change? I don’t know. Slots for, I don’t know, sacrificing a pigeon? I don’t know and nobody’s around to tell me. So I go to the desk, hopefully, and the girl rolls her eyes at me and hands me a door lever thing. It goes in the slot. Aha!
So I go, open a door, do what I was there for… and realize I left the handle on the wrong side of the door and there is no way to open the door. It opens in. It is floor to ceiling. It is soundproofed. Oh shit.
The lights go off. They were on a timer.
I was trapped in that stall for at least ten minutes, maybe more like twenty.
Meanwhile, I get Advil in a child proof container… so how the hell does the stupid bottle keep losing its top so I pull an empty bottle out of my gym bag and then have to dig out the 150 loose tablets?
Seriously. Can they not find a happy medium between “unopenable” and “dumps itself in your gym bag/purse/coat pocket”?
:eek: :eek: :eek: I hope you aren’t claustrophobic. Seriously. I almost passed out just thinking about this!
I’m nominating Zsofia as The Winner.
We have a electronic money cards for use on the trains. They’re cool and work well. No problem with the design there.
However, the problem comes when recharging them. They hold a maximum of 20,000 yen (about $185). You can recharge them with cash or a credit card issued by the rail company.
The credit card ATM designers, with less forethought than wannabe silica salesmen in the Sahara, decided that (1) although you need to insert both your credit card and the smart card, it will only proceed if you have inserted them in the order they want. Note that it will allow you to insert them in the wrong order, and do the touch panel steps, but god forgive you if you put the wrong one in first, then it’s back to Start. (2) And here’s what annoys the hell of out me, you are given a choice of how much money you can put in: 10,000; 5,000; 3,0000; 2,000 or 1,000 yen. Once you select the amount, it kicks your cards out and you’ve got to start all over from the start. So if you want to max your card and start with less than 1,000 yen in, then that’s four transactions.
WTF? It is to hard to allow people to choice the amount they want? There’s a hardware keypad there, (the one you use to input your PIN), and suddenly it’s too hard to write a subprogram to read how much people want? If you wanted to be really helpful, then say how much more someone can enter. Shit, even give that as an option.
Oh yes. I have a pot at home that I never use because I already give up on trying to remove sticker maliciously put INSIDE. No water, detergents, scrubbing or anything was enough. I’d guess only option left is to obtain some strong acid or something.
I keep several pairs of EMT shears around the house for opening obnoxious blister packages. You can buy them cheaply on eBay. It still takes too long to open the package, but they are safer than many of the other ways of doing it.
I hate most modern electronic consumer products for several reasons. The documentation sucks, being printed in tiny type suitable for making microdots for the CIA. It was translated from Chinese to English by someone’s brother-in-law, who has trouble writing a coherent sentence in Chinese, let alone English. In an effort to shave pennies of the manufacturing cost, all knobs have been replaced with switches, and as few of them as possible. They think that the average digital watch is a shining example of good user interface design. The designers assume that everyone has 20/10 vision and perfect color perception.
Well, the stall was larger than most. But I did have a moment of, what if I never get out of here? What if nobody ever ever needs to use the bathroom again? What if they do come in but they can’t hear me?
Then I realized they’d see the handle in the door and either they knew the system and knew that probably meant somebody was in there and stuck, or they were newbies like me and said, hey, I can open that stall!
But it was REALLY DARK. Completely pitch black.
If you can reach inside the pot, try either nail polish remover or oil (cooking, baby, whatever).
‘Like dissolves like’ - most adhesives used on stickers are organic. Water won’t touch 'em. (acid probably won’t help, either)
Kitchen sink stoppers. There appear to be two types.
One is the type that leaks no matter how carefully you set it in the drain, so you can only get a few dishes done before your dishwater all goes away.
I complained about this to an ex and he went and bought me an “industrial quality” one. No, it does not leak. Not a drop. My sink stays full of soapy greasy water until I decide to pull the plug, at which point the problem becomes apparent: the thing is almost impossible to remove. And the knob is covered in little spikes, to improve your grip on it, presumably, when your hand is soapy and wet; they also hurt like the devil when they dig into your finger when you are pulling with all your might against the “industrial quality” seal. You cannot use tongs or any other implement to remove the stopper, nothing but a human hand has the strength and agility to grab it as it needs to be grabbed.
Sometimes I like to leave a sink stopper in the sink, loose, so that the strainer function of it will strain out solids but allow liquid to pass through. This is what I have done with all my previous (leaky) sink stoppers, and it worked quite well, keeping the muck in the basket so it doesn’t go down the drain. However, this appears to be impossible with my stopper. As soon as it approaches the drain, the “industrial quality” seal grabs hold. Which means that if I forget about this aspect of my sink stopper, and try to, say, drain pasta in the sink (before noticing the stopper in there), I have the pleasure of sticking my hand into a sink full of boiling water, getting a firm grip on a spiky knob, and pulling with all my strength.
Perhaps there still exists a sink stopper that seals the water in when I want it to, and lets the water out when I want it to. I’d also like a pony.
Oh yes. I had one of those industrial-seal types, except that it would only seal if rotated just right so that its internal grooves aligned. Finding the precise point was like safecracking a combo lock, while all the while your precious soapy water was sluicing away. When it did engage, nothing was going to remove it.
The worst part was, instead of a spiky grippy knob, it had a frog for a knob. A stupid ass frog with a stupid ass smile looking up at you. Mocking you. I hated that frog with a passion.