Packaging

Each week, Fernando has to, of course, saw through a number of plastic wrappers and security stickers and lord knows what else in order to move the enclosed plastic disc from one holder to another. In eighty percent of these cases, the process is straightforward and painless: a slide of the razor over the top to break the plastic seal and security sticker and then a quick one down the side to allow peeling of said plastic seal. Ten percent of the time there is no plastic seal, so Fernando just has to cut through security stickers. Five percent of the time there is the annoying double-security sticker that forces Fernando to make an extra cut along the bottom.

The remaining five percent of the time the packaging of the movies in question is so godawful moronic that it defies logic and should require whoever came up with said packaging to take a remedial course in packaging at Michigan State University (no, f'real, they offer a major in packaging).

The worst offenders are “beyond big hit” titles. Things like the Twilight movies, which have a wrapper surrounding the paper sleeve that holds a fold-out house with its own plastic wrapper and security stickers. Sometimes there are flaps of paper attached to the inner moviehouse by some sticky-tac.

Fernando thought he had seen them all. But then came The Social Network.

Imagine, if you will, a rectangular box. This box has a plastic wrapper around it, and has inside of it a slide-out smaller container that holds the actual DVDs. The wrapper is cut through and it turns out the image on the front of the package is not painted onto the package, no, but is a U-shaped piece of paper that is actually not attached to the package proper at all. And, yet, this piece of paper is the only object that provides any obvious clue as to what the contents of the inner box are.

Fernando wonders if Mark Zuckerberg perhaps had a say in how the film of his life story would be packaged, but then remembers that the case has something resembling privacy settings.