deflated ego

The backs of labels sometimes make me concerned. They make me feel depressed, unintelligent, and dense. Take for instance the label directions on a popular heat-and-serve garlic bread (the name will be withheld to save face). On the back, under the bold title “Conventional Oven”, it first instructs you to turn on the oven to 350. This I can understand. This is reasonable. Of course the directions did not need to tell me to turn on the oven, all that was really important to know was the temperature itself, but the wording flows nicely this way.

However it is the next instruction that causes some frustration. It says to take the bread out of its bag. I am no kitchen wiz but never before have I attempted to cook anything in its store bought container. Soup cans always experience a can opener, tea is guaranteed to be removed out of its pretty decorated tin before it is placed in a cup, often times there are no directions on poultry, but somehow I manage to remove the meat from its packaging and place it in the oven just fine without any guidelines…hmmmm.

After the bread is safely out of the box, the directions then say to place the bread on a pan. Do they need to say this? Do they think that I will football pass the bread into the oven? Do they think that I don’t know that the loaf needs to go on a pan? Do they think that I can’t tell that the buttery cheesy coating will melt in the 350-degree oven that they told me to turn on in the first instruction? I guess not. Somehow they feel the need to reiterate to me that the bread needs to go on a pan.

Now this fourth instruction is what is really bothersome. Place the pan in the oven the label says. Where else could or would the pan be placed? In the dishwasher? In my car? Outside on the front lawn??!!! Who knows what alternatives the label writers predicted, but for some reason or another they felt that this last instruction was very necessary. Maybe they predicted an accident might happen because as the uncooked garlic bread was laid out on the sidewalk to bake, instead of in the preheated oven; someone would trip, break their ankle, and then sue the company claiming the garlic bread as the reason for the fall.

You see, I was using up time telling some of these frustrations and woes to my friend Kristi as I was sitting on a blown up palm tree. I was sitting on the tree in an attempt to deflate it as it had served its purpose for the week of Vacation Bible School at church. The problem was however the tree was not deflating very fast. Despite my effort of bouncing up and down on it, laying on it, and pinching the stopper in various angles so more air would come out, progress was slow. After many minutes of this, Kristi turned around from her position on the ladder to face me and said, “Why don’t you try unscrewing that large plug at the bottom?” I told her I did try but there was a stopper in it. “Take out the stopper” she smiled. “Oh” I said. So I unscrewed the large plug again, pulled out the stopper, and watched my palm tree seat minimize very rapidly as the air rushed out.

Some deflation directions, maybe printed on the base of the tree, near the large plug, would have been nice just then. Some simple, clear, precise directions. Thankfully Kristi was there and came through for me. In her absence, who knows what could have happened. Out of frustration I might have scissored the tree into deflation, cut myself, and sued.

Maybe I'll have a piece of garlic bread and ponder all of this…