What did you just call me!?!?
For as long as food has needed to be kept fresh, meat has had to be protected from freezer burn, and marijuana odor’s legally shielded from the police, we have turned to plastic baggies to save the day. These wonders of environmentally unfriendly chemical compounds come in handy almost daily for many of us, making life so much easier and our iceboxes fridges so much more clogged up with nasty leftovers that only the roaches will ever feast upon. The only thing keeping storage and freezer bags from being the perfect culinary hoarder product is the fact that they’re about as easy to close up as a hooker’s coochie.
Aw, man. The tuna spoiled again.
What’s up with the fucking seals on these bags anyway? Lining up those little plastic strips and getting them to snap inside of each other is about as complicated as using bilingual pictogram instructions to put together the Space Shuttle. The amount of food we’ve thrown away due to shitty baggies would feed all of the starving kids in Africa if Sally Struthers didn’t get to it first. About the only thing baggies ever formed a tight seal around was your three year old brother’s neck when he’d stupidly ignore the suffocation warning on the box.
Give that kid a Darwin Award!
After being pelted with rotten food from unsatisfied customers for years, the baggie conglomerates finally got serious about doing some research into how they could improve their product so that people everywhere could go to sleep at night knowing that their sausage wasn’t being spoiled by an unzipped fly. And you know I wouldn’t be talking about closing damn baggies on a Friday if it didn’t spawn a great retro ad campaign or two!
Oh, sit on it Mr. Cunningham!
First up, in the late 80’s, Glad came up with a colorful way for us to determine if those unwanted lima beans were still going to be fresh for tomorrow’s breakfast…
Rather than actually improve the closing mechanism of their bags, Glad Lock instead just came up with a way that you could maybe tell if the bag was closed if you didn’t happen to be color blind and/or stupid. One of the basic art lessons we get in school during the days when the big honking Crayolas are more of a safety hazard to children than the pussy scissors is which colors mix with other colors to form other other colors. Now every time we put that nasty open can of cat food in a baggie, we could relive the fucking mess experimental fun of fingerpainting in pre-school.
The genius behind the yellow and blue make green baggie innovation.
About the only thing more moronic than putting piranhas in a thin plastic bag is trusting an optical illusion to tell us if our baggie is actually closed or not. If the yellow and blue strips are so far apart that we don’t see a solid line of green as we peer upon our bag, then chances are we could have probably picked up on that breach in the seal even with a non-colored bag. Yellow and blue makes green didn’t really help save any more food from spoiling than the time-honored practice of wrapping up future noms inside of intestines.
Would you like some spoiled pancreas from the fridge, Clarice?
Well, Glad Lock wasn’t any help in keeping our goody bags airtight. Luckily, in the early 90’s, Ziploc showed us that instead of trusting our eyes, we should let our fingers do the walking instead…
Yes, to demonstrate the amazing closing power of their new Gripper Zipper, Ziploc decided to give us all the finger.
Apparently, Dow blew their entire advertising budget on those Scrubbing Bubbles animations.
So we got introduced to Finger Man. No, he wasn’t a lost mini-boss from the Mega Man series… he was just the index finger of the commercial’s Best Boy Grip since there is no such thing as union scale for fucking finger models. Finger Man didn’t even get a cute little finger puppet to dress himself up in… he just popped up in the buff with nothing but a little smiley face scrawled atop his bald digit and lip synched to annoying voiceover guy who does a bad imitation of someone who’s been sucking on helium.
Or huffing glue through a yellow and blue almost made green bag.
How do we know the Gripper Zipper is actually closing the bag that we’ll leave rotting in the crisper? Because you can feel the teeth coming together as Finger Man slides his stupid little pinkie face across the baggie, that’s why! It must be working because we can feel it working that something is happening! Sound familiar? Yes, the same leap of faith Denorex wanted us to make a decade earlier is now what Ziploc is banking on for you to forsake Tom Bosley and trust a stupid finger who can’t even give its advertising pitch with a straight face.
I think we’ve found a worthy winner to sock this award to.
What was even more insane than trying to make us believe a little snap, crackle, pop was ensuring that our meat was going to be kept fresh was the very fact that Ziploc decided a crudely anthropomorphized finger was the proper spokesdigit for their product in the first place. Sure you need to use a finger to close a storage bag, but you also need fingers to use just about anything, and there wasn’t exactly a proliferation of product pitching fingers out there in TV land. For that matter, did any automobile manufacturer prop up someone’s right foot to advertise their cars? Were the ads for those starving artist sales told by a closeup of some creepy looking eye? Could you imagine if Trojan used this line of thinking to advertise its condoms?
Remember to always wear a helmet, kiddos!
Well, it’s time to finally put this post in an unsealed, ummarked bag and chuck it in the back of the fridge to rot with all of the rest of the inedible, unreadable content of this room temperature blog. But before we get to watch the appliance bulb goes off and we get confined next to the half used stick of butter, The Nest would like to salute Glad Lock and Ziploc for keeping everything under wraps. Thanks to you, we will always remember why the water turns green when we take a leak, even if we really didn’t want to know why fingers are always smiling.
WARNING: Reading Evil Squirrel’s Nest while eating may cause severe nausea, indigestion and vomiting. Seek a baggie immediately.
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
I have to admit that I was a fan of green and blue bags, I never used red bags… seems the finger had mesmerizing powers :o(
I remember we used to have sandwich bags that came in four different colors… one of them being green. Who really wants to look at something they’re going to eat through green film? Not surprisingly, they didn’t sell very well…
I liked the finger with the face on it. But to be honest I couldn’t tell you for which company it was spokesfinger. All those plastic bag ads just melt into one thing to me– boring. It’s a bag, ‘ya know?
It is my job to stock those bags, so I have to pay attention to them at least a little bit. I just realized when I did this post that we don’t sell Glad Lock bags at work… the only Glad product on the baggie counter these days is plastic wrap. I wonder if those yellow and blue make green bags are still being made?
Good question. The next time I’m in K. Roger I’ll have to look and see.
I’m trying to work out if “busty woman sitting in pile of money” or “doggie in dishwasher” is your most-used photo 🙂
I really wish there was some kind of stat that would let me see what my most used image is, because I’ve always been curious about that myself. I’m not sure either of those two would be tops on the list, though I’m sure Dishwasher Dog would be up there. I should do a post sometime on some of my favorite pics I reuse over and over again…
Mom could never get those bags lined up to shut. She was a klutz from long ago. Thank God for Tupperware bowls with lids – snorts with piggy laughter XOXO – Bacon
I hear Tupperware bowls are good for “hiding” cats in…. you didn’t hear that from me, though!
Heads up – really?! Oh squeals. I must try that this weekend. XOXO – Bacon
Ok, that last picture made me a little nauseous…
I used it before in one of my Millionaire posts, and of course it was the first thing I thought of when I needed a happy finger gag. Yeah, my mind is a preverted wasteland…
Yeah, Tupperware. Now where are those freaking lids?!
That reminds me of how many extra lids we always end up with at Mecca that people don’t purchase along with their storage totes, trash cans, etc. If we sold Tupperware where the lid came separately, I’ll bet customers would leave a bunch of them behind too…
People are so … slow. Their squirrels love them for the lack of the lid on their new garbage cans, I’m quite sure, Bill.
Dude, the disclaimer goes at the TOP of the post… Sheesh…
Oops! I guess I didn’t want to scare anyone off until they were finished reading… 😉
I hope I don’t think about that last photo every time I need a Ziploc bag for anything…. The finger dude is kinda creepy too. Suddenly, storage bowls seem more appealing! 🙂
Fingers end up in so many places they really shouldn’t go, it’s just really offsetting to see one so happy….
This is hilarious! I had forgotten all about Finger Man…
Thanks so much for checking out my new blog, comicallyquirky.com. It means a lot to me when I get a “like” from a fellow blogger, especially one with such an awesomely witty and entertaining style of writing!
Thank you! I enjoyed Tooth Fairy POV post! Usually the magic word is “squirrel”, but I got crazy the other day and searched blogs for “unicorn”… and that is how I found you!
Unicorn- a magical animal and a magical keyword. I think that might have been the first time I’ve used that word in a post. I’ll see about squeezing in something about squirrels in the near future. Ha ha!
we had glad and sad bags. 😀
I think we sell those sad bags! They usually burst apart at the seams as soon as you start putting something other than air in them…
LOL! Yes that is them.
Garry cannot close a zip-lock anything. I buy the ones with the little zipper widget, but half the time, they don’t close. And you’re right. All the baggies do is encourage me to keep things that belong in the trash. Why do I save it until it grows an unmentionable fungal coating? Because I have BAGGIES and I can!
My current thought it that if i cannot remember what it was, I should dispose of it before it gets away and does real damage!
Yeah, when you need the CSI team to identify what it once was, it might be time to pitch those leftovers. I rarely use baggies, but my kitchen hoarder helper is aluminum foil. Foil makes the game more fun, because you can’t even start guessing what it is/was until you open it….
I use those baggies for my knitting and craft work, not for anything that actually needs to be kept air tight! Because I’m just a geek like that…
And finger man? eeek, too scary. They’d have done better getting Thing from the Addams Family around.
Poor Thing couldn’t talk though because nobody bothered to draw a face on him. Perhaps he could pitch the product in sign language…
That was certainly how he communicated with Gomez in the films with Angelica Houston and Christina Ricci in!
My favorite part was the Rowan and Martin photo. “Sock it to me!”
Baggies and their uses were definitely covered in all aspects here, some gross, even. 🙂