You Do Not Want This Product, Part One

Christmas and my birthday occur at about the same time, so I need to come up with a bunch of gift ideas for family members. However, my gift ideas are often either boring (socks) or prohibitively expensive (a netbook). This year - whoops, I mean last year, since I'm talking about 2009 - I solved the problem by putting a lot of CDs on my wish list.

As a result, I ended up receiving five CDs over the holiday season. I just opened up the third CD (Air's Moon Safari, if you're curious) a few minutes ago, and I'm sick of the CD opening process.

By the time you get a CD opened, you're half convinced that the record companies would prefer that you not listen to the music. First you have to take off the wrapper, and then you have to peel off the really sticky wrapper that's on the top of the CD. Basically, it's a huge hassle.

But it isn't only the evil record industry that packages its products in an unusable manner. I'll continue this thought in a post on my business blog.