Option Number Three

In this new house we live in I have a workshop right off my office, and for the last few months it has been a disaster area. Boxes of drone parts, small drones, medium drones, large drones, tools all over the workbench, odds and sods and bits and pieces. It’s been bugging me. Sometimes the clutter gets too much even when it's behind a closed door—you can just feel it lurking there, stewing in disorganization, gathering strength, sucking in random bags of screws, masking tape, and half-empty bottles of Gorilla Glue. Soon the workshop will be sentient so it had to be stopped.

In the garage where the motorcycles live there is a large tool box on wheels that my dad gave me. In it are a lot of different tools and things, but it lives outside like a malamute dog named ‘Marcus’ that has an insulated dog house and patiently waits in the cold for his people to come home. I love that tool chest, but it’s for outside, I need an indoor tool chest. So, I went down to Canadian Tire and bought a spiffy little inside job. Coincidentally that is what I’ve decided to name this tool box, ‘Inside Job’.

While organizing the workshop I discovered some outside tools that needed to be returned to Marcus; out they went and I was left with an empty drawer that needed to be filled with screwdrivers. Fast forward to me arriving at the Lowes tool aisle to find myself a decent set, and fill the last empty drawer of Inside Job.

I got a nice complete set of Milwaukee's sealed in plastic, plastic so rigid and thick and unyielding, that I’m not sure I’ll ever get them out. It’s like they’ve been hermetically sealed for my protection. Why do they use this stuff? Sure, you can get a pair of shears and hack a ragged line through the plastic, but this invariably results in the creation of a brand new cutting edge—the severed plastic now a double-sided mandolin hell bent on flaying your hand. You can only cut so far with scissors before your hand becomes a lacerated bloody mess.

I find myself cursing out loud quite regularly when I’m alone.

What to do? Do you put down the scissors and try to pry the plastic apart? Well, first off your hands are too slippery from all the blood, and second the seam of the plastic has been designed by NASA to withstand solar flares and hold the nose cone on a shuttle during re-entry. This is a set of screwdrivers. Lives are not at stake. Scratch that, my life is at stake as I cut another line with my scissors in a desperate attempt to get a #2 Robertson out of its eternal plastic cocoon. You could make nuclear bunkers out of this stuff. How much blood is in the human body?

Across the room I see an acetylene torch and ponder it’s possible uses: melt apart the packaging, or cauterize my wounds? Alas, I opt for option number three and just put the whole damn thing into Inside Job’s gaping drawer, slide it shut, wipe off the blood, and head upstairs to make tea and write a sternly-worded letter to Milwaukee Tools packaging division.