Month: October 2013

Tide Pods – a.k.a. The Latest Example Of How NOT To Design A Product

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For those who haven’t been living in some cave somewhere (Warning – I may be getting just a tad snarky with this reference to people living in caves) apparently Tide Pods are all the rage, and/or something that’s throwing concerned motherly types into quite a rage, and for good reason too.  These little doodads allow someone to just drop one in and do a load of laundry.  If they were plain-looking things like some kind of laundry version of a toilet tablet or something it’d be one thing, but the geniuses at Procter & Gamble decided to make the darn things look like brightly-colored candies instead.  Oops.

Now add to this ease of confusing children the potentially deadly fact that these things contain super-concentrated detergents and are designed to dissolve when exposed to liquids.  What do kids have in their mouth?  Liquids.  :-\  Really, this whole thing was an absolute disaster by design.  P&G changed the packaging on these things in response to incident after incident after incident of children being poisoned by these things (here’s the latest from a Google search I did before typing this up) and has typed up a little blurb about proper handling and storage of these things, but the root of the problem is the design.  These things should NOT be so bright and colorful, or have anything resembling the design that they currently have.  The smell of these things could be improved as well.  I was looking at a bag of similar detergent pod type things and the sweet smell coming from these things smelled almost exactly like some kind of candy.  It didn’t even smell soapy or like detergent – just sweet!

These things are so horrendously-designed one could swear it was malicious, or just plain naive from someone who knows absolutely zilch about raising children.  There’s even a Change.org petition regarding this, but I think the most that P&G should do here is stop making these things look so flashy and maybe make them smell a little more like detergent from a distance.  Needless to say, The Consumerist has been having a ball with this mess.  😛

CPSC Issues Safety Alert On Detergent Pods

Grandmother Of Poisoned Boy Asks Procter & Gamble To Stop Making Tide Pods Look Like Delicious Candy

…and as for me, I’ll stick with my powder detergent, which just happens to be Tide right now, but at least that stuff smells more like a soap type cleaning product.  😛  It’s just appalling to me that issues like this are happening in the year 2013.  Kids and issues related to keeping things out of kids’ mouths that shouldn’t be there aren’t exactly a new issue last I checked…  :-\

Forgotten 45s: Firehouse – Love Of A Lifetime

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Man.  The last time I heard this on *ANY* radio station was…… uhhhhh…..

I am not kidding.  Rock stations, Lite stations, 80s stations, 90s stations, stations that play a bazillion love songs, but never this one.  Then again, nearly a decade ago when I was in college I was probably the only person who even knew the name of this band as opposed to merely knowing the song.  Firehouse was one of those maverick hair bands that actually went big in the 90s that uninformed folks forget even existed because some pop culture revisionists like to go around saying things like the minute the calendar flipped to January 1st, 1990 the whole world simultaneously perma-ditched its Aqua Net Extra Hold and tossed on some flannels.  That’s not exactly how it happened.  Melodic rock stuck around for a bit even as the angsty grunge explosion did its thing (“Van Hagar” anyone?  😀 ) and the alternative character of the 90s actually took a few years to really pick up steam.

As for the song, #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in September of 1991, but far more popular among couples thinking of getting married.  I probably have heard for more folks say nice things about this song related to playing it at their wedding than anything related to MTV or even the song being played on the radio.  Even as recently as the 2000s I’ve heard of this song being used for weddings, but since then, not so much…  😛