The Powers that Be

Can you spot what's wrong with the following vignette?

A car alarm starts honking loudly. "Hurry!" you say. "Someone's car is being stolen! I'll call the police while you run and see if you can get the licence plate number before the thief gets away."

That's right - it depicts something that never, ever happens. Can you correct it?

A car alarm starts honking loudly. "Again? If that doesn't stop in a few seconds, let's pound on the car or on the owner until it does."

Here's another:

A pedestrian is coming toward you, looking down and texting on his phone. He bumps into you. "What's the matter with you?" he says. "Can't you see I'm texting?"

This is different - this is something that happens all the time. The way to correct it is to take more initiative yourself. Since he isn't watching where he's going, he must be indifferent to whether he collides with you or not. Accordingly, you drop your shoulder and knock him off the sidewalk into a snowbank, saying cheerfully, "Cool, eh?" You mustn't, of course, do this in anger.

Here's a tricky one:

You buy a blunt kitchen utensil that comes in a package made of clear plastic more rigid than anything they had in the bronze age, and hedged all around with big industrial staples. You open it using the easy-pull tab, and the paper, plastic and metal separate easily for recycling.

It's a two-part question. The first part is simple - there is no easy-pull tab, and the materials are glued and riveted together. But then what do you do? I see at least four possible answers:

Using a special tool you bought for the purpose, you open the package easily in only two or three minutes, and you are soon enjoying the new utensil.

Using only common household tools, you get the package open after ten or fifteen minutes, but you've cut your hand so badly in the process that you won't be able to use the new utensil for a month or so.

You're in your golden years, and after trying for an hour, you don't get the package open at all. You'll make do with your old utensil when your wrist gets back to normal, if it does.

You're in your golden years, and you ask your adult child to open the package. She does so without injury, but it turns out the new utensil doesn't work.

Ah, you might be thinking now - the author is old and cranky and doesn't keep up with modern things. But you would be wrong. I even used the internet to help with the last riddle. I started with a Wikipedia article entitled Wrap Rage. The article belongs to two different categories, a larger one called Packaging and a much, much smaller one called Rage. I'd have thought there was more to rage than to packaging, but I was mistaken. It was very educational. It's true what they say, you never stop learning.

And that's not all I learned. As I began to follow various links, I found out I was completely wrong about the car alarms, the walking and texting, and the impenetrable packaging. These are in fact all good things that have been called up by the market. I thought maybe car alarms shouldn't be allowed, or that they should be penalized. I thought walking and texting was bad citizenship, though of a minor kind, and that heavy packaging of safe products was wasteful of material and human resources. I even had a notion that we ought to settle on and require the use of a single, durable type of beer bottle that could be recycled over and over and over, that wouldn't always be breaking and that wouldn't ever have to be sorted when you returned it. We could do the same thing with pop. But it turns out that the things we have now are supplied because they're demanded. Not only that, they're supplied in pretty much exactly the numbers that are demanded. You'd almost think God had a hand in it.

I'd had a very close call. Interfering with the market would be economic sin of the most serious order. I counted myself lucky, and I resolved that in the future I would be much more mindful of the theology of economics. It's never too late.