Senior Un-Friendly Products

The world is getting less friendly to us older folks. Stuff we used to use with ease is becoming a challenge.

As much as I love Apple products, they are designed for the young. My AirPods are labeled “R” and “L” for the right and left ear. At least I think they are. Most of the time I can’t even see where the label is, let alone tell whether it’s "R" or "L." They are a tiny typeface in the lightest shade of grey on white. And I’m nearsighted. I read without reading glasses and my husband passes me medicine bottles with tiny print because I can read them. How do people with normal vision read these letters? Can you?

Can you read the L and R? Neither can I

Speaking of medicine, what’s with these new labels that have five pages with peel-back corners? In the old days when you bought aspirin, the back of the bottle gave easy-to-find directions in readable print: take one every 4 hours. Now you have search through several layers of impossible to peel sheets with unreadable print searching to see if you should take one or two aspirin. The directions are buried among tiny-print Uses, Drug Facts, Warnings and Ingredients.

One diabolical over-the-counter medicine has two layers of peel-back sheets, one that you peel from the upper corner and the second from the lower corner. One hand is holding the bottle, so you are using only one arthritic hand to peel back the first layer and somehow keep it from flopping back to the sticky part while you try to grab the lower corner of the second layer.

Peel 1st sheet from the top and 2nd sheet from the bottom - diabolical

The instructions with my mail-in pharmacy aren’t any better. Oh, they are readable, in large senior-friendly print, but we get 4 letter-size pages with every pill bottle. We don’t even know what some of the pages are for.

Then there’s the bottle with the safety lids you have to push down at the same time you turn the lid. With some products it’s such a struggle I don’t put the lid back on completely. That could lead to messy spills later on. The thing is, a watchdog group for Safe Kids says those lids can be child’s play, even for preschoolers. (1) So, we can’t remove them but toddlers can. But there’s hope! How to Make Evil Childproof Caps Easy to Open (2) gives instructions with a video. I just hope it’s something people our age can do easily.

Sometimes convenience features make stuff less convenient. Pull tab cans are tricky. Most soft drink pull tabs will break a nail unless I use an aid, and I don’t always feel like searching for a knife or a key just to open a soft drink. The pull tabs on larger products such as soup cans can be impossible. If the tab isn’t a problem, it’s the strength of the lid. If I’m lucky I can inch the can open one tug at a time without tipping the can over. Sometimes I have to admit defeat and pass it to my husband. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather use my hand crank can opener. I know I can open cans with it.

Those new, “convenient,” one-serve plastic containers for pet food have a foil-like cover you peel back to get the food. Removing that cover takes me several tries and all the strength I can muster – and I lift weights. Sometimes I tug so hard some of the juicy gravy flies out all over me and the counter. At least the cat licks it up. Other times I give up trying to peel the entire cover off and end up digging the food out of the container with a spoon, which leaves a lot of food in the container. Oh well! The cat needs to lose weight anyway.

You need the finger strength of Atlas to open these

Then there’s those plastic or fake metal bags that hold cereal, chips, coffee. Opening them is like a tug of war. Many times the bag wins – ripping in the wrong place with cereal flying all over the place and nowhere to store the leftovers because the bag is demolished. Sometimes I use scissors, but on the coffee bags I can’t cut the top off because I need the top to fold it over and use those little tabs to close it. If I rip the coffee bag while opening it, I have to find the duct tape to repair it (or just ignore the rip and then the coffee gets stale).

This bag isn't too bad. Sometimes they rip down the whole front.

Finally, there’s those handy resealable bags. They are handy; When they reseal. Many don’t. When they don’t, I waste minutes trying to get the interlocking parts to interlock. Do I start at the end where they are already locked? That usually doesn’t work, so I start somewhere in the middle where I can see the ‘male’ part and the ‘female’ part. After a few times trying to get them together, I give up and find a clip. Apparently, they’re not in the mood.

References

1. Rosen, Jeff and Josh Davis, Are child safety caps enough to keep kids out?, Today, April 9, 2015

2. SFHandyman, How to Make Evil Childproof Caps Easy to Open, Instructibles Living