I cannot seem to part with an old space heater. I blame this affection for an inanimate object on fond memories of that thing turning my cold upper east side apartment into a furnace during those mean winters of 1995-1997. I showed up to work those days sharing rave reviews to strangers, telling one and all how this winter ain’t nothin’ now that I got a space heater.
Some shook their heads, decrying space heaters as dangerous. Today I might agree with that verdict but back then the heater-haters could not shake my resolve or adulation for that ferociously heated beast.
These days I can barely find a use for it. I have heated blankets and an apartment that gets so hot in the winter that I have to open windows and turn on box fans to cool down. And the last time I tried to use the space heater it blew a fuse, causing half the apartment’s electricity to blow out. Like a lot of people I have far more electrical devices now than 10-15 years ago, and space heaters are particularly hungry for juice sucked up by all that other gear.
I also have a hard time discarding packaging. The boxes in which cameras and computer gear shipped can be more useful than user manuals in succinctly and tantalizingly calling out the products’ features.
More than that, though, packaging-retention for me is further blamed on the fact that I used to work in package development. The discipline was not an interest of mine but having ended up in that field for a few years I find that I have maintained an appreciation for packaging as an art form.
At that job I sat in meetings where specifications and production requirements for lipsticks and cardboard boxes were fleshed out by engineering and development, then torn to shreds by inventory managers and designers. Development directors and marketers got into passionate arguments about tubes, vacuum-seals, screw-top caps and perfume spray pumps. Managers’ fists pounded tabled, marketers’ complaints were assailed, double-doors left open cleared a path for the predictable stomping out of a notorious hothead.
One engineer routinely sat me down in her office to lament her frustrated desire to do interesting work with tubes. Speaking dreamily about her brief work at another company with toothpaste tubes she eschewed what she described as “conventional biases” against tubes in the cosmetics industry, claiming that packaging liquids and gels in tubes was both elegant and waste-free (waste, she said, was the most common knock against tubal packaging).
“You can do interesting things with tubes … when you have money.” From that comment her litanies trailed off into dismay, her eyes closing mostly shut, arms gently crossed across her torso, lips straightening. As the dream of doing great things with tubes gave way to reality her countenance assumed a rigor-mortal cast in a way that I felt expressed her ambitions’ death.
I experienced countless “I have to get out of here” at that job but the persistent jeremiads of the tube dreamer stand out. I am both surprised and happy, however, to look up that woman’s name today and find that she recently won an award for her contribution to an innovative tube-based product design. Having maintained and nurtured a decades-long passion for tubes it seems she finally triumphed.
As ludicrous as package development might seem for someone of my background I think that time working in a field far from anything I might have willingly pursued was well spent.
