being a connoisseur of mixed drinks, an idealist caught in the quixotic pursuit of the perfect blend of soft drink and sour mash whiskey, a mediator, liaison, and, at times, martyr struggling to bring together the corporate entities better known as your local coca-cola bottlers’ association and a jack something-or-other from lynchburg, tennessee, i go through a lot of coke at my place.

before i’m forced to defend myself, let me just tell you that i can be considered by most (ok, some) to be (alright, a few) a somewhat (fine, fine…just me) intelligent individual. i’ve completed a frame-up restoration (including engine rebuild) on a mid-seventies honda motorcycle. i’ve built over a dozen (kick-ass) computers for friends and family. and, almost daily for the past twenty-nine years, have tied my own shoes (you leave the “velcro 80’s” right where they need to stay…in the past). but, i digress…

where in the hell is quality control?

after eighteen credits at the local community college, followed by four hours of retinal burn staring at a computer screen just waiting for an error message, you’d think, in this day and age, that a guy could just stop at the local grocery on the way home, pick up a 12-pack of soda, walk into his tastefully decorated bachelor pad, and pour himself a drink…right? if you answered “yes,” where in the hell have YOU been? you’ve obviously never purchased a “fridge pack.”

sometime between a misspent youth and an even more-poorly-spent young adulthood, some “genius” in corporate america (or the basement of some marketing firm) came up with the brilliant notion that, for some reason, i’d base my soft drink purchasing decisions on, not the tasty beverage contained there-in, but on the effing box…and how well it fit in my ‘fridge…and how trendy, neat, and cool the access “port”, let’s call it, to those beverages was. herein lies the problem.

again, where in the hell is quality control? you call those perforations? seriously, simply picking up the box by the “engineered” handle causes package buckling, and they can’t build a machine to cut all the way through the cardboard? and, as anyone who’s ever built a snow fort knows full well, should you succeed in tearing off the “port cover,” there’s not going to be enough material left at the front of the box to maintain structural integrity. finally, adding insult to injury, they cut their little “port” right through a perfectly good, “normal” box-end…which is now rendered completely useless and totally unusable as such.

did anyone ever consider the physical demands placed on the consumer by such packaging? there’s the cold sweats once you pick up the box coupled with the increased audio acuity listening for the faintest sound of tearing. there’s the balance and coordination it takes to keep the weight evenly distributed across your four fingers, maintianed exactly centerline of the the box. then i’ve three flights of stairs to ascend. by the time i finally do get home, i REALLY need that drink…but not just yet. there’s the flurry of physical activity (and stream of cuss words that would make yosemite sam blush), the precarious balancing, holding, tearing, pushing and pulling trying to remove the “port cover” while retaining the soda cans in their rightful place, the bloody knuckles that result from metal-grating shelves and just not enough space, the frost bite, and the emotional strain of epic failure since every…single…time…a veritable fountain of violently shaken cylinders of volatile carbonated liquid spews forth leaving me drenched, out of breath, and trembling on the sun-faded linoleum amidst the “wreckage” of aluminum and shredded cardboard, reminiscent of an ADHD Christmas.

just talking/thinking about it makes me want to have a drink, but i can’t…i haven’t “opened” the box yet.

Similar Posts:

• Modifying Fergus Henderson’s Rarebit
• Why I Think I’m Awesome, And You Should, Too!
• Shout Out to African Dock Workers!
• Got ‘R’ Dun.
• Why so socialist?