Benign Bureaucracy

While making the bed this morning (this was after I did the dishes and hoovered the flat--and, yes, I do this voluntarily) it occurred to me that the task would be less onerous if there was some sort of consistency within the bed linen manufacturing community.

These guys must get together for drinks at some point during the year, if only to fix prices.  You'd think, while they were at it, they could all agree to put the laundry tag in the same corner of the sheet so people like me could use it as an reference point.

Some brands of sheets have the tag in the lower left corner, others in the lower right. This makes for much switching about when I try to stretch the short side of a fitted sheet over the long side of the mattress. And this wouldn't be necessary if they would agree to put the elastic bit (another useful orientation aid) along the same edge of the sheet--either the long edge or the short edge, I'm not fussy, just pick one and keep it there.

I knew this was simply a flight of fancy; what government agency would realistically concern itself with such trivial matters? Then it hit me--the EU.

The European Union is brilliant at fussing over minutia; it's the only thing they do well. Just this past Christmas, they held up delivery of my bottle of whiskey for two months because they decided the label wasn't quite right. And in Barrowford they closed down a cheese factory that had been operating happily for many a year (and at a cost of 23 local jobs) due to a minor violation of some ill-conceived standard they imposed. (This, standard, as it turns out, was so ill-conceived, they later retracted it, but the factory remains closed and the erstwhile employees, one must assume, remain unemployed.)

Considering their regulatory zeal, tasking them with sorting out this bedding label anarchy can only improve matters and will, as a bonus, transform them into a benign bureaucracy by keep them from committing more large-scale damage.

All of my current sheets--especially the ones I brought over from America--would suddenly become illegal, but I would consider that a small price to pay.

And once they pass the Bed Linen Consistency Control Bill E49-7364ADPWX-KDUV447-973 and confiscate the contents of my airing cupboard for failure to comply, they could turn their collective attention to packaging.

The United Kingdom may have controlled the greatest empire the world has ever seen and emerged victorious in two world wars, but they still haven't figured out how to adequately wrap anything.

I don't ask much from my packaging, I merely expect it to be sturdy enough to protect what is inside, relatively easy to open and provide a means for resealing the package if necessary. I will happily settle for two out of these three, and will grudgingly deal with one, but many British packages fall well outside any of these categories.

A typical cereal box in Britain, like America, has a tab on the top flap to enable convenient resealing. The difference between England and America is, in America, these tabs actually work. Here, the boxes appear welded shut with some sort of super cardboard bonding agent that only MI6 knows about. Opening one generally results in the box looking as if it has been fed part way into a wood chipper. If the flap with the resealing slot is not completely destroyed, you will find it is impossible to slip the tab through that slot without the aid of a sturdy hunting knife, preferably one with a saw-edged blade.

All of this is moot, of course. The Kevlar sack where the cereal actually resides is impregnated with titanium thread; the force required to breech this device guarantees an explosion of puffed rice or crinkled flakes throughout the far reaches of the kitchen, sitting room, back bedroom and, often, into the communal hallway. This is why I generally have toast for breakfast.

At the other extreme, I have seen whole stacks of boxes in the frozen food bin at the grocery store where each container has spontaneously sprung open. Buying one of these packages insures that the fish fingers will slide out into your shopping trolley or carrier bag because, try as you might, you simply cannot reseal the box.

And certain brands of here bread come wrapped in a brittle cellophane-type material that splits the length of the loaf the second you take the first slice out, presumably to keep you from becoming too accustomed to fresh bread.

Surely something can be done about this, and the EU is the only agency with the Bureaucratic balls to undertake the task. It's a win-win situation; they will be too busy to interrupt any more of my whiskey orders, and I won't be forever vacuuming fish finger bits out of the back seat of the car.