Marian Bantjes goes ballistic

…about plastic packaging. Read it. It’s worth it. Go, Marian!

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The sound came about 3:30 in the morning. I knew what it was, of course, but it was nothing that I had any intention of dealing with in the middle of the night.

While making coffee, I checked under the stove.

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Memo to designers: good design that doesn’t work for end users is BAD design.

Case study: the new green garbage cans that we are now required to use so that foodstuffs can be composted (they take the things that you would normally put in your own compost, but also things that you wouldn’t, like meat scraps).

These cans have a handy-dandy handle that snaps over a lip to lock the can against the depredations of errant dogs and raccoons and the like.

Now, I’m not the strongest person in the world (or even on the block), but I’m not frail, either. However, the fit of this device is so tight, and the metal handle so hard to hold, that even after 5 minutes of flinging my (not inconsiderable) entire body weight against it, I couldn’t shut the lid properly and just gave up. (Getting soaked in the pouring rain didn’t make me feel better about the whole thing, either.)

So here’s a question for any Gabriolans out there who’ve been using these: is it just our container that has a problem, or is it a general design flaw?