The Village Idiot: I have no luck opening CDs
I like CDs. They’re convenient and they’re indestructible. Well, almost indestructible. Unless you have, oh, say, a dark green car like I do. Then they’re very destructible. On a sunny day I can fire pottery in the back seat of that thing. I’m thinking of renting it out as a portable kiln. The poor CDs don’t have a chance. I ran into the grocery store for a jar of olives and by the time I came out my music collection looked like a Salvador Dali painting. I can’t listen to it anymore, but it does look nice hanging above the sofa.
Some people say it’s no big loss, the old vinyl records sound better. This is a fancy way of saying they are too cheap to replace every record they own with an expensive digital update. If you are cheap, be proud, own up to it, don’t make excuses. Nobody buys that vinyl-sounds-better hooey. If you can tell the miniscule difference in quality between a CD and vinyl record, you should be making CDs not buying them.
And even if vinyl did sound better, try and play an old 33-1/3 record in your car. And there’s still that melting-when-you-go-to-buy-a-jar-of-olives problem.
Still, even with the possibility they they’ll turn into wavy, silvery Christmas tree ornaments, I would buy more CDs if it weren’t for one small technical problem. I can’t get them open.
How is it that they’ve figured out how to put 74 minutes of music on one little plastic disc but they haven’t figured out how to make a package that doesn’t take a knife, a chisel, a jigsaw and four fingernails to open?
They say it’s to protect against shoplifting. Yes, it must be hard to shoplift with most of your fingernails missing, but there must be easier ways to prevent shoplifting. Something tells me the shoplifters have no problem opening these packages. It’s only the people who pay for them who aren’t in on the secret.
CDs aren’t the only things that are hard to open, it’s everything. I bought a pair of golf gloves because they were such a good deal, two-for-one. They were sealed between two sheets of clear, semi-hard plastic about the size of a piece of typing paper. I finally got them open but I couldn’t play golf for two weeks because my hands were shredded after opening the stupid package. Let that be a lesson: use metal shears, not a kitchen knife. My hands still bleed if I move my fingers too quickly, but the doc says the raw skin and general tenderness will gradually go away. After a few months. The knife we had to throw away.
I ordered a ski helmet on the Internet last year. It came in a box about the size of a steamer trunk. It was carefully packed in foam peanuts and bubble wrap as if it were a delicate piece of Venetian glass. It was a ski helmet! If they think their ski helmet is going to get damaged in the mail, do I really think it’s going to protect me when I hit a hemlock at 60 miles per hour? Or am I supposed to cover the helmet in bubble wrap when I go skiing ?
I bought two replacement ink cartridges for my printer. The total price was much more than I paid for the printer itself. But if you buy two bundled together in impenetrable plastic it’s cheaper than buying two separately. It costs them more to package the two together, so the price is less. Go figure. They sit on my desk unopened, my fingers still too tender to go at them.
I had asked Sue to pick up a pair of metal shears the next time she went to the hardware store. She just got back and handed them to me. They are sealed between two sheets of thick, rock-hard plastic.
(Jim Mullen contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly, where he can be reached at [email protected].)