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Posts Tagged ‘anger issues’

A Sticky Situation

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

I just spent the last twenty minutes trying to remove a giant sticker from my new step ladder. Two giant stickers, actually. I got so mad, my head started spinning around and I began screaming things like “These stickers suck socks in hell!” I am still frothing. Twenty full minutes. Count them, twenty. I timed it. And I’m still not done! Not only did I waste twenty minutes of my precious time today, I have to go back and sit there and rip off teeny tiny minute pieces of this nasty evil sticker, one match-head sized piece at a time. And the stickers are freakin’ HUGE. One foot by eight inches big. No lie! They’re vast, each covers an entire step of the ladder. Fully half the ladder is covered with these insidious stickers. Infuriating!

Who are these morons at the ladder company who order these things? “Oh boy, I’m gonna save the company a whopping two tenths of a cent per ladder with cheap paper and army surplus glue. That will win me my promotion!” If they’re gonna adhere a billboard-sized sticker to their product, they could at least have the decency to use thicker paper. This sticker is three quarters adhesive and one quarter paper. The only way to get it off is to pry itsy-bitsy pieces off with a fingernail. Maddening! And there’s no one to scream at! What have I done wrong except for buy this manufacturer’s product? Why do they hate me so much? Why must I be submitted to this kind of torture? Someone contact the White House. Forget flushing the Q’oran down the toilet, make those prisoners at Guantanamo do ten hours of sticker removal. Better yet, send them my ladder! That chore would break anyone.

Sometimes I get so frustrated, I just give up and leave the damn stickers on stuff. Makes the objects look like hell, but how much time do I actually have for sticker removal? Last time I looked, making money, fixing food and getting the oil changed in my car took priority over sticker removal. I checked my To Do list for the week and sticker removal wasn’t even on it. This is not something I plan for. It’s a job that sneaks up and attacks me like some sticky stealth bomber. I hate the manufacturer of the sticker, I hate the person who made the decision to order and adhere the cheap ass sticker—a GARGANTUAN sticker at that—to the entire step of the ladder. I’d love to leave it there, but the sticker is printed on shiny, glossy stock and I don’t want to slip off and break my neck. The manufacturer added insult to injury when they printed this on their diabolical sticker: “Please Remove Sticker Prior To Use.” Bastards! Taunting me! What they need to say is this: “Prepare To Waste Hours Of Your Precious Time Removing This Sticker Because If You Don’t And Slip Off And Hurt Yourself It’s Your Own Stupid Fault And You Can’t Sue Us For It Because We Printed This Warning Here And We Used Cheap Glue To Make Sure You’d Be Spending Quality Time Looking At It”.

I wish the sticker manufacturer reign of terror was limited to the rare purchase. But no, businesses are now covering more and more products with permanent stickers and price tags. Yes, I understand the need for protection against shoplifting, but these people have gone too far. This week alone, I removed stickers from a credit card, two lamps, four shirts, ten apples, four bananas, one lemon, seven zucchini, a watch, four bowls, six glasses, a planter box, two garbage cans and now, this freakin’ stupid step ladder from hell! That’s waaay too many stickers. And over half of them had to be removed one atom sized piece at a time. I wonder how many billions of dollars are wasted each year in lost productivity due to sticker removal. Countless, I’m sure!

While I almost understand the placement of stickers on non-grocery items, the one thing I cannot fathom is the advent of pricing individual pieces of produce. It’s criminal. When I was a kid, the only produce with stickers were bananas. I still have Chiquita Banana stickers stuck to some of my childhood books. But those came off easy. And damn, with bananas, you can just leave the sticker. Peel the banana and you’re fine. But zucchini and apples have edible peels. And the stickers on both my zucchini and apples were tenacious little buggers. Unremovable. I finally just dug the stickers off the outside of the zucchini and threw away little chunks of vegetable with the stickers. But the most egregious offenders were the stickers on my apples. The paper came off, but not the glue. I got so frustrated that I ended up just eating chunks of glue. Or I ate all the way around the stupid apple and left the part with the adhesive. Which wastes perfectly good food, all because some chemical engineer can’t come up with a good glue. We can cure cancer, we can give people new hearts, we can fly people into space, but we can’t come up with a good removable sticker for apples? Come on, people! Get with the program! Stickers are not part of the food pyramid. Stickers provide no nutritional value, taste bad and stick to your teeth. Last time I checked a menu at a restaurant, they didn’t serve the fruit and veggies with a side of sticker. My Joy of Cooking doesn’t even have a section on how to cook stickers. And Martha Stewart has never featured stickers on her dinner menu. Because stickers are not food and therefore have no place on produce!

So now I find myself seriously thinking about returning the ladder to Home Depot to make a point. Which, I know, would be an exercise in futility and aggravation. Home Depot is the closest thing the US has to an East Bloc market. You wait in long lines, there is only one kind of whatever object you seek, it’s not what you want, but there are vast quantities of it, and it’s cheap so you buy it anyway. Home Depot is a big, nameless, faceless totalitarian dictatorship. This is what we offer! You will buy! If I went in there complaining about stickers on products, I’d end up talking to a minimum wage employee who is more victimized by the corporation than I am. Home Depot doesn’t care. I think they intentionally buy products with permanent stickers. They probably train their people to pick the product with the most permanent sticker. It’s probably one of their markers for a perfect product. “Which sink do you like Mabel? This one or this one?” asks Harry. Mabel replies, “Which one has the sticker that’s hardest to remove? That’s the one we want.” If I actually pulled a Michael Moore on a Home Depot executive and ambushed them regarding their sticker policy, they would probably give me some BS line about how their stickers help with theft prevention. How many billions are lost to shoplifting each year. Which is actually a valid point. I know hundreds and hundreds of people stash ladders in their pockets every year and just walk out the front door. Millions of dollars are lost every year to ladder theft. It’s an epidemic.

I just figured out that the thirty dollar ladder has cost me an additional twenty bucks in sticker removal time alone. And I’m not even done yet. After I get done ranting here, I have to go and take off the rest of that stupid sticker from that stupid ladder because I’ve got half of it off and it’s a big sticky mess. By the time I’m done, a thirty dollar ladder will cost me seventy bucks total. Not to mention a healthy portion of my sanity. I’m not sure it’s all worth it. After all, I bought the ladder so I can change some light bulbs. Which will enable me to see better. So I can remove the stickers from my purchases more efficiently.

I bet the manufacturers of stickers make Prozac.

©2005, Janet Periat

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