things kevin hates

A little while I was doing the dishes. (Yeah, that’s right. I do the dishes. I know that’s pretty much the #1 thing women look for in a man, so ladies, just line up over there.) I was down to the end of the box of Cascade, struggling to get the last crumbs out before opening the new box. I shook the box a bit and the next thing I knew there was powder all over the floor. Needless to say, this was highly frustrating. And it would also be entirely avoidable, were it not for the idiotic design of every dishwashing powder box ever.

As you probably know, there’s a little piece of metal that pulls out from the side of the box. It’s about 3/4ths of an inch long and hinged at the bottom; you pull it out and pour the detergent out through the opening. For some reason, however, there’s about a half-inch gap between the top of this piece of metal and the top of the box. So, inevitably, when you get to the end of the box and go to pour the detergent out, some misses the opening (it’s only roughly one-third the width of the box) and gets stuck in the top corner. Then you have to shake the box or rip the top off to get at the rest of the stuff.

Now, I’m no engineer, but surely there are better ways to design an opening for the detergent to come out of. Push the opening up to the corner and widen it? Make the top detachable? Alas, I’m guessing that we are the victims of a vast corporate conspiracy; the less detergent we can get out of the box, the more we have to buy. Consumer Reports even had an article about containers that cling desperately to the last remnants of their product.