December 3, 2010
I took some time last night to get Christmas presents wrapped. While getting my niece's presents taken care of I had an epiphany: The people who design the packaging for children's toys are some of the most hateful people on earth.
It turns out that getting the wrapping to do the nice little overlapping thing on the edges of a DVD case was the easy task. After that I had what should have been a nice, easy, rectangular cardboard box... that had most of one side and one of the corners lopped off in a fusion of physical design and sadism.
With some effort and a little cursing I was able to get the thing wrapped without destroying the cheap paper I'd bought at Walmart thinking it was a good deal. Then I turned my attention to the "fun suitcase" for a popular tuber-based toy... and just said fuck it and used about a half a roll of Scotch tape to hold that sumbitch together.
The child in question is three. I realize that I could have wrapped things in today's Post (thus marking the first time in years that a newspaper would have been useful to me) and she wouldn't have cared. But I'm just anal like that, so real wrapping paper done up as nicely as I could manage was the order of the day.
And if I ever meet the people who designed those packages I'm punching them right in the junk.
