Ah the tamper evident packaging that makes it practically impossible to open a new bottle of eye drops in the morning when you’re groggy and your eyes are dry and won’t focus accurately. Remember the Tylenol scare person in 1982? There’s the person that sent the American public over the edge of panic ridge and from then on, pill bottles were sealed safely shut. That person was never caught, by the way. Never mind that our generation was busy doing our fair share of swallowing entire bottles of Bayer baby aspirin because they tasted exactly like Pez (shout out to one of my cousins who won himself a trip to the ER with this one).
Over the following decades, more products joined the tamper evident packaging trend, including my eye drops. Which makes me feel safer, and I probably am safer. This extra packaging used to also make me believe that the product was indeed the product that it claimed to be on the container label. Until I watched Slumdog Millionaire and realized that any kid with a tube of SuperGlu can easily counterfeit fresh bottled water. Great.
This is where being a GenXer makes tamper evident packaging worries tolerable. We’ve been described as being cynical and untrusting. We learned how to walk in un-baby proofed homes. We grew up without seat belts, bike helmets or antibacterial hand wash. We went to college without cell phones or the internet. Sometimes we got hurt. That’s life and we’re realists.
These days it’s news of the week that beef, spinach, cantaloupe and the like are unsafe to eat, flame retarget chemicals are making us sick, and the list goes on. I vaguely recall that my Grandma had a wise saying something alone the lines of: “Eat fresh fruits and vegetables, and you’ll always have nice hair and skin!” Pretty hair and skin in a casket after I die from a contaminated cantaloupe rind. So here’s how GenXers view all this cantaloupe business: heck yea we are cynical and untrusting. We’ve seen things go wrong and we expect things to go wrong because in our experience, um, they do. It’s nice when things go right, but there are too many crazy people and unscrupulous companies to expect too much from our sealed tubes of so-called Crest toothpaste.
Maybe I think too much, too early in the morning, annoyed that I can’t get into the new eye drops that I desperately need to rewet the contacts in my eyes that feel like corn flakes. At least when I did finally get the bottle open, surprise! The eye drops weren’t laced with acid this time. Because everyone knows from high school chemistry class that corn flakes + acid = ?? I can’t remember exactly. Anyway, my point is that the next time you try to remove a tamper evident seal, try not to think too much about it and be glad when products don’t hurt you. Or you’ll get a stress headache and need to open a new bottle of pain reliever with you-know-what on it.
Musical pairing: “It’s a Beautiful Day,” U2 (2000)
genxsandwich 