Kind To Your Hands

In this day and age where everything is wrapped in ‘new and improved packaging’ (which means what exactly and I give a shit why?) you occasionally come across something from a simpler time.

Usually that something is the old fulla in the office who types with two fingers, writes everything in pencil and religiously stops whatever he’s doing at 10.30am and 3pm for smoko, but sometimes it’s a product like this which optimises the phrase ‘no frills’.

I suspect my work buys Genes Grease Cutting Lemon Detergent because it’s cheap as chips anyway, but more so by the carton load. This particular bottle actually is the ‘new and improved’ packaging because it has a sticker on it, whereas the last lot we had was plain text printed on the bottle. Well retro.

And the best bit? That the lid is held on by several pieces of sellotape. That’s right. No tamper proof kiddie-no-bastard-can-open-it lock here, just some geezer taping down every lid on every bottle. If he’s lucky Gene might have invested in a tape gun by now, but I doubt it; the sticky label is enough progress thank you very much.

This reminds me of how Bruiser and I played silly buggers in Home Economics with the dish washing liquid one time and emptied a three litre bottle of the stuff into one sink of water. Well, what else were we going to do all lesson, cook? The very next lesson our old spinster of a teacher gave a 10 minute lecture on how totally unacceptable it was that we, as a class, had gone through so much detergent in one go. Result!

The funniest thing about that term of Home Ec was the table of Asian girls who always got there a little bit early and proceeded to slice and dice their way through a mountain of vegetables before anyone else had even got their gear out. This continued right up till we started to cook, even on the days we weren’t doing vegetables...

So good on you Gene. Your simple ways are indeed kind to my hands and to my hope that somewhere out there are folk like yourself who aren’t selling out to progress because everyone else is.