Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 18, 1994                   TAG: 9404190021
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BOOMERS SHOULD TAKE THIS RAP

This is a sinister business here, and I think those baby boomers are responsible. A survey recently told them that Social Security funds may run out in 2036 - eight years earlier than originally thought.

I think they will keep up this evil packaging campaign until all of us are off Social Security the hard way and there will be more money left for them.

You can say I'm senile and paranoid if you want, but you haven't seen the way they had this new watch band packaged.

It was in a kind of plastic sleeve, and I finally got the watch band out after I had wrestled the sleeve to floor and stabbed it several times with the surgical scissors we keep handy for occasions like that.

Once I had made the hateful thing give up the band, I had to cut and slash my way through transparent tape to get to those little posts that hold the band to the watch.

You know those little posts. It takes a brain surgeon a couple of hours to install them properly.

I was breathing hard and sobbing when I finally got the new band on the watch - backwards, as it turned out.

There are other examples.

You know about those cardboard milk containers that you have to strangle before you can make the little spout come out like it's supposed to?

Why do I think people lived longer when milk came in real glass bottles and you could see the cream at the top?

There are those video cassettes that come in this plastic wrapping that was designed in hell. I'd rather grub stumps than struggle with those suckers.

And when you get one open, you worry because you don't know what to do with all those stick-on labels that are inside.

You're looking at a man who cries like a baby when he tries to get a couple of soda crackers out of one of those waxed-paper sleeves without tearing the waxed paper.

Try pulling the tinfoil off the top of a new jar of peanut butter in one splendid sweep. Can't be done. Gives you this ridiculous urge to drown a plastic jar of peanut butter.

Listen. Those people know how much old geezers like their peanut butter.

Those boomer people won't get me, though.

You just watch as I try to open this vacuum-packed bag of coffee so that it goes swoosh!! like it's supposed to.