Okay, so I have to ask. …

Okay, so I have to ask. Am I the only person in the world who finds it almost impossibly difficult, getting the packaging off new CD's? First there's the plastic, which sticks to your fingers with static electricity, so that even if you can get it off, you can't put it down. And then there's the sticky stuff, which I often forget to peel off, and thus spend a few minutes cursing and trying to just yank open the CD case before I remember that there's a second step. Makes me feel like a five-year-old -- all thumbs.

The CD's in question were, by the way:

  • Trout Fishing in America: Infinity
  • Christine Lavin: Getting in Touch with My Inner Bitch
  • Dar Williams: Out There Live
  • Loreena McKennitt: The Mask and the Mirror
My reward for going to the dentist yesterday, and my incentive for keeping my butt in my chair, reading, for the next two weeks, instead of wandering over to the dangerous tv set. I hardly ever buy new CD's, so it's a real treat when I let myself do so. Of course, that also means that I've invariably forgotten how to open them in the intervening months...

8 thoughts on “Okay, so I have to ask. …”

  1. YES!!!! Whoever invented that particular
    kind of cellophane wrapping had or has
    some serious problems which go far
    beyond CD wrapping. A kind of
    pervasive, universally directed, malice.

    The only thing I have found that works
    reliably is a needle or straight pin
    to puncture the cellophane, gouged along
    to tear it. This is workable, but not
    really satisfactory.

  2. It is nowhere nearly just you. In fact, I believe there’s a near-universal loathing for CD packaging. Everyone I know hates the stuff.

  3. I’m trying to remember where I saw it, but I have seen “CD Openers” for sale, I think in some of the mega stores like Virgin or Towers. Like a letter opener, but designed for CD packaging…

  4. you are not alone. I make my partner open all of our cds because I hate them that much. food in sealed with additional shrink wrap plastic safety seals around them are also particularly loathsome.

  5. I appreciate your solidarity in my distress. I’ve found that a small serrated steak knife works pretty well, if you run it along the top edge of the CD case. If only I could plunge that knife into the heart of the idiot who designed the stuff instead…

  6. I was told when I first stepped into the developed world that here all packaging was easy to open. It was part of the milk-n-honey deal (and way better than both anyway). Cereal packets, soup pouches, juice cartons, they all flaunted an ease of use unheard of in India (where, of course, you didnt have to do it yourself in the first place).

    And, then I bought my first CD. In India (paradoxically?) CDs come covered with loose, noisy crunchy stuff that the shipper’s anyway have opened for you but in the land of M&H they came all slick and undamaged and clinging like its job depended on it (which I suppose it did).

    I used to scrape the edge on a mildly rough, lime-finish wall in India, rather splitting the thing open, but the inventors of the stuff here have first covered every wall with the sort wallpaper that frustrated my best efforts (and cost me glares from my aunt to boot – but hey she’s the one who gifted the CD).

    Of course, by then Id discovered potato chips and cheeseballs too. The land of M&H was proving distinctly sticky.

    The funny part is, cassettes come with the same technology as wrigleys, a friendly neighbourhood bit of tape embedded into the wrap that does the job rather neatly. What did I miss with CD covers?

  7. Hee. 🙂 I believe the plastic on CD’s has a similar bit of tape, but it never works. I don’t know why. It is one of the great mysteries.

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