Forget the old saw: Old People Can’t Get Into Their Food. Now nobody can get into anything. It all started with the Tylenol poisonings back in 1982 and has escalated from there.

So crazy people, beware. There is no more ease in ‘tampering’ with stuff. If you want to hide yourself in the corner of a drugstore and do something dastardly to some medicine basking on a nearby shelf, you are going to need a hacksaw and a drill, because nowadays everything is protected, from aspirin to flash drives.

I bought some face cream the other day and after ten minutes of struggle even with a pair of scissors, had to ask for brawnier help. It took my husband and me another ten minutes to get into a package of which any instructions were made unreadable by our efforts. We tore, cut, ripped and bit our way to success, but if the manufacturer wanted us to know something in particular about the product, it was lost. Plus all this safety in packaging costs extra $$$. And that extra $$$ is passed along to the consumer. And it gets worse. Long gone are the days when you can take an unopened box or bag of anything with you to the beach, hoping you can just rip it open when needed. You need to make a plan of access. You need tools, brawn, time, and energy. Sure it’s safety. And sure, it resonates of today’s security issues. But boy oh boy, I sure would like to open a bottle of Tylenol without being equipped with tools often used for cracking a safe. Just sayin’.