BFO's

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

There has been a step in the packaging of my fudge that has driven me batty. I finally ended up paying our son to do it as I was ready to rip my last remaining hairs out.

The shrink wrap band. Now, this is the first time I've ever dealt with applying these things so I have no idea what they're supposed to be like. I asked the supplier for the size needed and then bought a bazillion in that size.

Here is the steps to getting them on..

1. Hold jar flat on table and with both hands, open shrink band and place over back of lid.

2. Now gently slide it on from back to front.

3. Oh, it popped off on the back. urgh...

4. Start back at step 1 - again gently sliding it over the lid and easing it over front of jar lid...

5. Drat! It folded under on the front. Remove and try again. ARGH...

6. Popped off again - now it's looking a bit mangled and doesn't want to go on at all. Discard and reach for another.

7. Repeat steps 1-5.

8. Make it all the way on this time. Now to move it down.

9. Applying *gentle* pressure, slowly twist the band around with one hand while holding jar stationary in other hand. It's slowly moving down, down - ARGH! The perforation split!! :high pitched screaming ensues:

10. Yank off and go back to step 1.

11. Get to step 9 and see stars and red as perforation again splits. Slowly and with cold fury, rip off shrink band and grasp the edge of the table for emotional support. Breath deep. In and out. Calllmmmmm....

12. Repeat steps 1-5.

13. Finally, after 30-seconds to 2 minutes (or more sometimes!) the blasted thing is on. Discard the pile of warped and broken bands and move to the next jar, taking a brief time out to beat head against brick wall.

Because the bands are so tight, doing a few dozen of these gives me a chaffed hand. It's oh, so incredibly time consuming. And frustrating to be throwing away 10 times the number of bands as actually are applied. And did I mention how frustating and aggravating and time wasting it is?!

I was at the office yesterday, looking at supplies for the deluge of orders I have to fill from a recent sale and I just about broke down over the idea of applying hundreds of bands. I honestly wanted to just dissolve into a puddle on the floor.

And then it hit me - I wonder if they have bigger sizes.

Now here is where the BFO (as a member on a forum I'm on calls it - Blinding Flash of the Obvious) comes in because as it turns out, there ARE larger sizes. A whole bunch more!

This whole time we could have just been quickly slipping those things over the top and then shrinking them down.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.... so many hours and days wasted! So many hairs on the floor! So many needless Tylenols and Aleves popped from the wall-banging headaches!

Thankfully I found this out *before* the huge packging day we've got coming up. I ordered them and paid for 2 day shipping so they're here in time. My son is nearly delirious with joy over not having to fight with bands that are marginally larger than the lids they're going over.

Whew! Wish I would have come to this realization a year ago. But, as this BFO goes, better now than next week after I'd been admitted for delusional and unstable behavior following a marathon session of appying shrink bands that were TOO SMALL!!