Give me some room, I’m beggin’ ya

Manufacturers of items that come in boxes and bags — pretty much every new item purchased today — need to get half a clue and step up their game.

The other night I had finished playing pickleball and was disassembling the net and came across that old, familiar feeling I always get when I take down the pickleball net.

That feeling is that I’d like to punch the person who designed the fabric bag in which the net and brackets are stored right in their pretty face.

Do these people who designed this pickleball set understand the basic principle of putting something new back into the original container?

My guess is they don’t, nor have they ever tried to place the product back into the bag, because if they did, they would realize one very simple fact: The crazy thing barely fits back into the bag.

What would be the problem of making the bag, say, a couple inches longer than the longest poles so the set of poles wouldn’t dangle outside of the zipper and fall out all over the place when I’m trying to put them back on the shelf once we’re done playing?

Every time I take down the net, I am reminded of how much I’d like to take out one of those poles, hunt down the person who designed the set and whack them in the skull with it.

Then I’m reminded I am a pacifist, so that wouldn’t be the proper thing to do. Plus, I think if I opted to pull off such a heinous stunt, my mom would get upset, and I don’t want to upset my mom.

Thus, I go on dreaming up ways to punish the designer of the set in my mind, where those awful thoughts will remain.

The pickleball disgust isn’t the only time I’ve encountered this situation where a manufacturer purposefully creates a box so small that once the item inside is removed, there is little chance of ever getting it back into the box without doing physical harm to oneself, becoming irate or damaging the item trying to ram it back into a home that was obviously too small for it to ever be crushed properly back into.

I present to you exhibit B: Hungry Hungry Hippo.

As one of the Save & Serve volunteers who cleans and prices games before busing them out into the main showroom area for display and sale, I have the honor of going through countless games on any given week.

Triple H continues to be one of the biggest contributors to my angst.

Why, may you ask?

Well, I’ll tell you why. Because once the hippos are originally released from their cardboard storage unit and assembled, there is no way on God’s green earth those four behemoth plastic critters are going back into the box, at least not as it was originally intended.

No matter how I may try to manipulate the hippos and coax them back into their shell of a home, they will not cooperate. Undoubtedly, I am left cramming them in, the result leaving a giant bulge as they rear their giant plastic bodies up and push the very limits of the box. It always creates a weird hump, and then when I place them on the shelf, there is this strange curvature that won’t allow me to stack games on top of one another.

Aggravation is certain to set in at that point.

Oh, and if you think HHH is alone in wielding this wild ability to create Cranky Dave, you’re so wrong.

Joining them are plenty of other rascally games that follow suit in refusing to go back in the box, games like Connect Four, Rock ‘em, Sock ‘em Robots and The Game of Life — all games that were created by some deranged psycho who thought it might be fun to design a box so intimately tiny that its user would never in a million years be able to get it back into the box once it was let loose.

Would it kill these designers to add a couple inches to the box so pieces and parts wouldn’t be dangling out upon putting the items back inside?

I think not.

Yet there are so many examples like this that it seems evident to me the creators of the boxes and bags purposefully built a container so vile and evil in its pursuit to drive me nuts that they find immense joy in it.

I wish they had the foresight to understand that every time one of their games is brought out and used, inevitably its user will be on the verge of tears trying to ram, cram and cajole the game back into its home.

Is that asking too much? Just give me a little space to work with and I’ll be a happy camper.

Chances of that happening are about as good as me getting the zipper closed on the pickleball set.