Don’t you find it strange that the natural tools human beings have, namely our hands, which have taken millions of years of evolution to develop, cannot be used to perform some of today’s everyday tasks? Try opening a packet that says “pull here”, or “tear here”. Even if you can get a firm enough grip on the part you are supposed to pull (unlikely), your chances of opening the package at the point indicated are slim to negligible. In my experience one of three things will happen:

– the opening you do manage to create is too small to remove the product

– such brute force is required to get any opening that the contents jump out, which is bad enough if its cornflakes, and disastrous if it’s milk

– the opening continues to tear long after it has supposed to have stopped, leaving you with the problem of how to close the packet.

One of the worst offenders is the wrapping that looks like paper, but is in fact plastic. This seems to have a mind of its own when being torn. A good example was a certain breakfast cereal (first letter W, last letter X) My suggestion to the company that they provide a dustpan and brush with every packet to sweep up the bits from the table and the floor seems to have worked (at least I like to think it was because of me): the product is now wrapped in normal paper.

I don’t remember having these problems back in the old days (and you notice I didn’t call them ‘the good old days’, because many times they weren’t). The worst thing that could happen to you was losing the key to the corned beef or sardine can. Can anyone out there tell me why these two products, and only these two products as far as I know, are still packed in these cans with keys?

You know there are a group of people who believe that the whole series of Apollo moon landings was filmed in a Hollywood studio. Could it be true? Well yes, of course, it could. After Russia won the race into space with Uri Gagarin’s flight in 1961, the USA was desperate to be first to reach the next big target: the moon. I would put the people who believe in the Hollywood studio idea in the same box as the people who still believe the Earth is flat (with personal apologies to any members of The Flat Earth Society who are reading this). I’m 99% sure Neil Armstrong did take “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. Why not 100%? Because I do wonder sometimes (don’t you?) how we managed to send a tin can 400,000 km to the moon and back, and yet cannot make a plastic packaging for the DVD I just bought that can be opened without a chainsaw.