At this point in my life, I have learnt that there are a lot of things in the world that are not what they seem. In fact, some are the downright opposite of what they mean.
For example, I keep seeing the sign ‘Free Cash’ on ATMs at train stations.
‘Free Cash? Really?! Let me get £200.’
I ran to the machine to ask for some free cash. It asked me to put my bank card and pin number in. After suspecting something was amiss, I told the machine I couldn’t remember my pin. But the machine didn’t listen and kept asking for my pin telling me to poke it sneakily so that no one else could see. After a while I demanded my card back and left.
It turns out that ‘Free Cash’ is not free at all. It costs exactly the amount you enter in the machine. Sometimes, they add 99p on top of that.
I thought to myself, ‘how come they get away with misleading signs like that?’
They are not the only ones able to mislead me. For a long time, I was under the impression that plastic bag manufacturers had a particularly soft spot for babies and children. On every plastic bag, there is a warning: ‘This bag can be dangerous!’ I looked at the bag from every angle. It doesn’t even move, nor does it look like it’s carrying any weapons of mass destruction or baring any sharp claws and teeth. The message continues: ‘To avoid danger of suffocation, keep this away from babies and children.’
It’s very sweet of plastic bag manufacturers to care about our little ones so much. But at the same time, they seem to think our generation of children and grownups are particularly stupid. On quite a lot of plastic bags, there is a message: ‘This bag is not a toy.’
It seems they envisage the following scenario happening quite frequently:
A man buys a battery-operated talking elephant for his daughter. When he gets home, he gives the toy to the child and she opens it with tremendous excitement. After taking the toy out of the box and the plastic bag, neither man nor child can tell which one is the toy: the plastic bag that looks nothing like an elephant or the thing in the plastic bag that actually looks like an elephant. That’s why the plastic bags have to bear clear big print: ‘This is not a toy!’
I find this quite condescending to say the least.
If they must say something at all, the following message would make much more sense, especially on shopping bags:
‘Warning! Don’t put this bag down with shopping inside it. If you do, it will tip over to one side and spill its contents out. But if you lean it against something to prevent this happening, it will stick out its tongue and shift to the other side to spill its guts out. If you change again and lean it on the other side, it will blow a raspberry and once again lurch forward, making a break for freedom. You’ll end up with cracked eggs, squashed cakes and open bottles of washing up liquid making your whole shopping slimy.’
Or this message:
‘This bag is very fond of gravity. Don’t put it on top of something. It will do a nose-dive to the ground, taking your shopping with it.’
Or
‘If you have even a tiny bit of dignity, don’t use this bag as your emergency poncho. You will definitely look silly and people will stare at you. You’re better off walking around with frizzy hair rather than this plastic bag on top of your head.’
Or
‘Warning! Too flimsy to transport your laptop.’
Or
‘Keep this bag in your handbag at all times. Otherwise, you will end up paying 20p every time you buy something. Not only that, you will quickly run out of space in your kitchen as every corner, worktop and shelf is occupied by plastic bags you have used once but don’t have the heart to throw way as you actually paid good money for it.’
Or
‘Save the whales from choking on plastic by reusing this bag. You don’t care about whales, you say? Think of it this way. What if you were a whale? Would you like it if it were you choking on the plastic? Get some empathy.’
Or
‘You’ve done it again! You have forgotten to bring a bag, haven’t you? You keep wasting money every time!’
If they must say things on the plastic bags, it would make sense to put messages that would actually help rather than insulting the intelligence of humanity.
In fact, the plastic bags in Yangon allow their users more dignity. They don’t have any warning signs nor any air holes in case you accidentally decide to stick your head in it and tie the handle tight around your neck (as you do). Unless they are from the branded shops, they have no printing at all. They just trust that their users have enough wits to be able to fend for themselves.
Yangon supermarkets are very generous with their plastic bags too. They don’t punish buyers with a 20p fine for forgetting to bring their own bags. In fact, they reward them by giving out as many free bags as they can possibly muster.
‘Here you are, madam. Your ten items in ten bags. Thank you for allowing us to use as much plastic as we possibly can. As some countries are cutting down on their plastic bags, we have no choice but to increase our usage to keep the balance. Thank you for shopping with us today.’
I looked at the generous number of plastic bags in my hand as I came out of my favourite supermarket in Yangon. They only had their shop name on it. I wondered how long before they too start to print some misleading messages on their bags.
I sighed. This is a tough world I live in.