Wrap rage leads to living life on the cutting edge

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Nothing destroys self-confidence like losing a battle with a package marked “easy open.”

Last week, a shrink-wrapped smoked sausage got the better of me. A big red arrow marked the easy-open corner where you peel the front from the back and the sausage gleefully falls into the skillet.

I tried peeling the easy-open corner with my fingernail. I tried separating it by flicking it back and forth. I thought about trying my teeth, but why risk hundreds of dollars’ worth of dental work on a few bucks of meat?

I decided to cut right through the package with kitchen shears but realized my old pair had snapped in two and the new ones I had purchased were still unopened in one of those impossible to open blister packs. It’s quite a conundrum when you need shears to get at your shears to get at your sausage.

Blister packs are the culprits often causing wrap rage. Maybe you haven’t heard of wrap rage, but it’s real. I know this because it is on the Internet. Wrap rage is defined as “heightened levels of anger and frustration resulting from the inability to open hard-to-open packaging particularly some heat-sealed plastic blister packs and clamshells.”

Ninety-one percent of Canadians have experienced wrap rage. Two-thirds of Brits suffer wrap rage. There are no statistics on the number of Americans suffering wrap rage because we are suffering from pollster rage, which precludes us from answering questions about wrap rage. So much rage, so little time.

Wrap rage is usually caused by blister packaging, a thick, hard plastic that conforms to the shape of the product and is virtually impenetrable, short of a box cutter, hack saw or the fangs on a German shepherd. If you do manage to pierce the packaging, razor sharp edges will then lacerate your hands and knuckles. In fact, blister packaging is a terrible misnomer. It should be called cut and bleed packaging.

Of all the things housed in blister packs (hair styling implements, batteries, tools, light bulbs) the saddest ones of all are the dolls. They cower in rigid, plastic bio domes with zip ties fastened around their limbs. It’s sick, like they’re in bondage. There’s something wrong about a child watching an adult wrestle a thick plastic tie from around the neck of Baby Drink and Wet.

Of course, the reason we encase and tether everything from toy trucks to cosmetics and computer accessories is to prevent theft. Today there is absolutely nothing that someone won’t steal — from steak and shrimp at the grocery to the copper tubing on an air conditioning unit.

Our youngest worked at a Bed Bath & Beyond in college and said the most frequently stolen item was the votive-size Yankee candle. I wish I didn’t know that because now whenever I’m in someone’s home and they are burning a Yankee candle, I wonder if they stole it.

It might be a good deterrent to theft to package votive candles in blister packs and then require offenders to open thousands of them using nothing but broken kitchen shears. And maybe their teeth.

Lori Borgman is an Indianapolis columnist. Send comments to [email protected].