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| Monday, March 28, 2005 12:08 PM |
| Interstellar Travel and Tampon Wrappers |
| by poppy |
A little while ago a friend and I were talking about how to communicate across language barriers, and she mentioned that showing someone how to do something is more effective than saying it over and over (pretending to turn on the stove, as opposed to saying, use this knob to turn on the stove). I thought but did not mention that I never felt that was really an option for me, seeing as I worked in sexual health and I don't really want to think about some of the miming I would have had to do. (If any of you have been spared the plastic-egg-surprise story, do remind me to horrify you at our next meeting) In any event, it got me to thinking about that project from some years back to create pictograms that would universally (literally) mean "do not open this as it will burn your face off and render you sterile, not that anyone would sleep with you if you had no face. Or arms." This of course in response to the fact that we now have the capability to blow ourselves to high heaven, and in order to be good stellar neighbors we should label our toxic waste as such so that when intelligent beings come to visit our world centuries hence they can leave with all appendages intact.
It has been decided by the finest minds of our (and previous)generations that it is impossible, and I believe it. Why? Because of tampon wrappers.
See, I have been part of the tampon-using set for over a decade now, and am devoted to my tampax regulars (as an aside, the following really only applies to applicator-based tampon products, as non-applicator tampons are the product of the devil). In all of the time that I have used them, they have had arrows on the wrapper indicating how to open them. Simple right? The arrows clearly point in the direction to be opened, right? Wrong! The arrows are pointing to the end where you should begin opening it. Open in the direction the arrows are pointing and you fuck it all up; in my case I'm usually so pissed off that I got it wrong again that I curse and drop the stupid thing on the floor, and because I've opened it incorrectly the tampon is exposed and thus lands on my bathroom floor, rendering it useless (I don't like to walk barefoot on my bathroom floor, so I certainly don't want... you know).
If we as a society can't figure out a user friendly way to indicate how to open a damn tampon, we certainly cannot be expected to protect the universe from toxic waste. Clearly, we need to stop with the nuclear waste and I need to switch to pads.
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