A genealogy of sneezes

2010-10-02T20:43:31+00:00

I’ve been thinking about sneezing lately. Mostly because I’ve been sneezing so much today I can barely finish a sentence. Either our landlords’ bamboo only flowers every seven years and gives me seven years’ worth of pollen allergies, or crawling out of my comfortable hobbit hole to attend social functions has given me a cold.

Anyhow, this sneezing has made me reflect. I myself have what I jokingly term the Atomic Sneeze (best restrained with ruby quartz face masks, à la Cyclops). It is extremely loud, and my poor sensitive-eared companion Ryan complains bitterly about it. (He kept covering his ears when we watched TV tonight, and eventually I saw him building acoustic barriers out of sweatshirt.) I keep telling him it could be even worse, and my sister’s sneeze is proof. Of course, since she isn’t allergic to everything on Earth except water and mold, few witnesses can back me up on this. My paternal grandfather’s sneeze was even more prodigious than my sister’s and mine, and my usual joke is that if he sneezed like that while he was in the Army, his comrades probably hit the deck.

Of course, it could be even worse: on my maternal side, my relatives seem to sneeze in consistent numbers. My grandma sneezes in the same pattern every time — I think it’s five sneezes? Of course, they’re such cute little noises that they’re quieter than a cat sneezing. Other family members appear to sneeze in threes, et cetera. I think Ryan should just be glad the two traits haven’t been mixed, because even a double-barrel of this noise could destroy our block, and five at a time would doom the entire city. Or at least give me whiplash.

Zyrtec-D: worst packaging ever

2008-08-06T11:43:02+00:00

I’m a very allergic person. I’ve been on one antihistamine plus decongestant or another for years, which is often inconvenient. For one thing, the insurance companies don’t like paying for all those meds, so they get the fast-track to over-the-counter. For another, the decongestant in my pills, pseudoephedrine, can be misused as a meth precursor. So the law restricts how much I can buy, requires me to submit my name to a Federal database, requires the store to keep them behind the counter, yada yada. Oh, also (thanks, Wikipedia!) the feds require “Non-liquid dose form of regulated product may only be sold in unit dose blister packs.”

I go back and forth between on-brand and store-brand, between Zyrtec-D and Claritin-D – varying antihistamine is better for your allergies, and sometimes there are coupons! Claritin-D comes in standard blister sheets: 6 or 8 pills, perforated divisions, exactly the sort of packaging we’ve all been opening since our parents couldn’t get child-proof stuff open and we volunteered to help. You rip the blister, out pops the pill.

Zyrtec, on the other hand, has this:

First of all, this is a waste of resources. The box is bigger and more complex (internal divider) to hold piles of individual blister packs, the blister packs use more plastic and foil than a traditional blister sheet. Secondly, they are absolutely positively without any doubt not “Easy Open” (who thought of the phrase “Easy Open Blister” anyway? The word ‘blister’ not associated with leisure and ease, folks.). You have to fold the tear to get it started, the loooong tear sometimes goes awry and doesn’t hit the blister, and even when it does follow the curving perforation perfectly, it only removes a shred of the blister around the pill, leaving the patient to dig at the heavy foil for a while before she can get the damn thing out. That’s without getting into picayune stuff, like it being easier to estimate how many pills you have left from a sheet than from a jumble of blister sarcophagi.

I know, I know, free market, free country, why do I keep buying them? Because I still have some $5 off coupons, and when you need medication to breathe, $5 off three weeks’ supply is not bad. And I can’t believe that the company won’t wise up eventually. After all, I am not the only person to post a picture of this package to Flickr with a grumpy caption. They can’t kid themselves they’re saving the world from meth by adopting such ridiculous packaging when the other brands aren’t encasing their pseudoephedrine in hyperbranded pucks that look like mini-golf greens. Give over, guys. I just want to take my allergy pill and go to sleep without sneezing. You just want me to buy it. Why can’t we get along?

Posts tagged with "allergy" - Faerye Net

A genealogy of sneezes

Zyrtec-D: worst packaging ever