Monday, May 26, 2008

Stuff and Nonsense


I saw a commercial today for something called Space Bag. It's intended to store fabric items like clothes, towels, and so on. You've probably seen it or something like it before -- basically a plastic bag with a special place to attach a vacuum and suck out all the air. The end result is that the bag and everything in it are much smaller than they would be otherwise.

Sounds great, right? I suppose so...unless you actually need to get to something in the bag. Then you have to first figure out which bag your item is in -- potentially no easy feat if you have several of them since most of the items inside may be tricky to identify when they're flat as a pancake. Assuming you find the right bag you still have to rummage through it to find the specific item, pulling out other nicely deflated things in the process. And of course, now that the bag and items have been re-infected with nasty, bulky air you've got to get the vacuum back out and re-deflate the bag again.

So maybe you don't necessarily use it for things you need to get to regularly. Stuff like seasonal clothing, for instance, might be more appropriate. And once it's all been nicely Space-Bagged you'll have all kinds of extra space for...well, for what, exactly? More stuff that's 75% air that you don't need to get to very frequently?

I'm not going to go on some sort of major anti-consumerism rant here. After all, I've still got plenty of my old baseball cards, comic books and other junk. I've owned a storage unit in the past. And I'm currently playing landlord to several boxes that have literally not budged from where we put them in our garage when we moved into this house four years ago. But good grief, even I have my limits.

One thing I DO know. The Space Bag people should have hired George Carlin as a spokesperson by now.

No comments: