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Fa la la la la, la la la la

By G.D.

By G.D. Maxwell

I like to think, as we approach the season to be jolly, I can dispel the negative thoughts and stresses accompanying it and generate, in their place, kind visions of peace on earth and goodwill towards men, women and, if pushed, even tourists.

To accomplish such a feat of uncharacteristic jocularity, there are just a few things I have to get off my chest, issues to work through as those in the helping professions fuzzily refer to them.

The most prosaic of these can, largely, be laid at the feet of one group. I like to think of hell – when I think of it at all – as having a special little corner, a foul-smelling, vermin-infested, scabrous, sweltering, flesh-burning suburb where eternity is spent by chemists, engineers and marketers responsible for modern packaging. This slice o’ hell is a soul-singeing laboratory where condemned men and women sit on hard stools padded with splintering shards of glass and spend an endless perdition, repeatedly and unsuccessfully struggling to open the packages they’ve foisted on the world.

I get no end of satisfaction imagining whomever is responsible for shrinkwrapping CDs ripping their fingernails to ragged edges searching vainly for any weak spot or seam in whatever devilish polymer they’ve cooked up to keep music in and people out of jewel cases. I smile silently to myself, an angelic countenance gracing my brow, seeing them cry out in frustration as they lose the last hanging remnant of their last bloody fingernail and are reduced to hopelessly gnawing at each corner in turn, over and over again, as the unyielding monolith wears down the remaining stubs of their blackened teeth, their own sense of hopelessness growing as they realize the impossibility of their task. Touché.

The cries of anguish coming from the CD room are, of course, but a single voice in a tortured choir of their fellow professionals who, facing the grim prospects of their own eternal damnation, are forever testing their receding brilliance, ingenuity and physical dexterity to do battle with potato chip bags, single serving condiment packages, childproof caps, security sealed envelopes, cereal boxes that can’t be opened without wholesale mutilation, ziplok packaging with zips more tenacious than the tensile strength of the plastic from which they’re made, an unending assortment of containers from which liquid cannot be poured without cascading over every downstream surface except the one desired, and pickle jars engineered to reduce an able-bodied man to a whimpering, limpwristed shadow of his former self.

Long may they burn.

Wow, I’m feeling more festive already. Let’s see, who’s next on the list?

A pox as well on the shills of high tech for they run nothing much more than an elaborate con game. The biggest and most heartless con is this: technology will set us free. In an Orwellian world where freedom is slavery, this con may have a tinge of truth to it. Pagers, cellphones, laptops and the wireless world have freed many from the confines of an office and allowed them to make the world their office, one from which there is no escape.

We need look no further than our own backyard to bear witness to these poor, indentured souls and the techno-tethered lives they live. They are the ones fishing in the 23 pockets of their ski jackets for a beeping phone. They are the ones cradling the phone in the crook of their neck while they rifle the remaining 22 pockets for their Palm Pilot so they can retrieve really important information to give to the person calling them. They are the ones whose faces become twisted in horror at the prospect of certain doom as they approach the end of the chairlift with a phone glued to their ear, a PDA clutched in their hands, their gloves God knows where and their ski poles still under their butt. Their unceremonious exit from the chairlift and subsequent garage sale is why chairlifts suddenly stop. They are free.

Freer at least than the pastyfaced, soulless gorm glued to a computer screen at a desk in an airless cubicle. If the industrial revolution chained workers to endless rows of firebreathing machines whose mechanical leverage allowed them to do the work of 10 strong men, the computer revolution has replaced those chains with filaments of fibre optics just as restrictive and freed individual office labourers to perform the work of 10 secretaries.

I like to think I’ll live long enough to see computers emerge from the faltering, dark age they’re mired in and realize some small percentage of their future potential but for now, I’m stuck in Fatal Error land, surrounded by machines about as reliable as pacemakers in a microwave showroom.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the speed of obsolescence would simply slow down long enough for the hardware makers and software writers to work out their codependent bugs, but that is about as likely George Bush and Osama bin Laden joining the same wife swapping club.

Even the Internet, that provider of spurious information, soapbox to the world, 24 hour all porn all the time, live sex shows from Amsterdam, one size fits none shopping mall, has lost its lustre and sold its soul for the promise of the next big breakthrough.

More often than not, stumbling aboard the information footpath is an exercise in futility. I can’t get to a Web site I’ve been to a hundred times without a new browser. Download time, approximately 4 hours. I can’t get to the audio clip I downloaded the new browser to hear without fetching a new media player. Download time, 2 hours. I’m forced to reconfigure the browser to accept those damnable cookies to get to the audio clip I’ve downloaded a new browser and media player for. Forget it; it wasn’t that important to begin with. Where’s that live sex show?

I won’t even go into the details of my newest crusade, a class action suit against everyone who makes and sells mattresses. The trauma is still too fresh. I will simply pose these cosmic questions for anyone about to enter that minefield. If a mattress and box spring costs $800, why does a mattress alone cost $725? Why does buying a mattress without a box spring void the warranty? Why does capitulating and buying both in order to have a warranty further oblige me to buy a mattress cover because if I have a warranty issue and there is so much as a single stain on the mattress, the warranty is void? Why shouldn’t everyone involved in this shady business be lined up against a wall and shot?

I feel so much better now, I can even face The Little Drummer Boy. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la, la la la la.