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This is one story that will make your feet rumble, seriously it isn’t for the faint hearted!

The stubborn plastic casing around the Microsoft Xbox 360 faceplate seemed to laugh first at the kitchen scissors and then the steak knife that tried to penetrate it. When 14-year-old Daniel Mroue’s attempt to open the thing with a long, serrated bagel knife failed, his parents became concerned.

Mroue’s father, George, took over with a pair of box-cutters, which did the trick. But George Mroue also ended up with a wad of bandages shoring up the damage after slicing his palm open on a sharpened piece of plastic.

“It was ridiculous,” groused George Mroue of the February incident. “There was nothing anywhere telling us how to open the (darn) thing. I don’t understand why they make it so goddamn hard to open these things.”

That’s an increasingly common question these days. From Psyclone electronics cables encased in impenetrable layers of thick plastic to DigiPower camera batteries coated with packaging several times the size of the item itself, the hardest part of buying electronics these days is opening the products when you get them home. In many cases, it makes solving Halo 2 seem like a kindergarten project.

This article from Wired explains a whole lot with fiddly packaging. I too have had such problems. For example, on Christmas day when I opened up my 360, Santa kindly left me a wireless USB adapter for the 360. It was so hard to open that I cut my hand with my pen knife (I was too lazy and excited to get a proper scissor) and sliced the manual of the adapter. You can see the manual in the image at the top. Some of today’s packaging so so fiddly and hard to open that they do pose a risk to people. Especially on Christmas when people are hyped up and excited. I may actually refuse to buy such things in the future unless it is really necessary because I know that I will spend half my time trying to open the damn thing!

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