Plastic Wrap

Plastic Wrap.

You and I both know it's From Hell, so there's no point pretending otherwise. The only thing, and I do mean ONLY thing, that elevates it from Hell all the way up to Purgatory is that row of little aluminum teeth attached to the edge of the box housing the wrap roll. That serrated edge makes tearing off a reasonably straight and even piece of plastic wrap the main not-hellish thing about the whole plastic wrap experience.

If you're having a good day and luck is on your side, your piece of wrap detaches from the roll with ease, wafts gracefully, with your aid, to its designated location, and fits snugly around or over whatever it is you want to fit it around or over. Most of my days are not like that. At the very smallest opportunity - phone rings, slight breeze passes through, I breathe - the wrap folds in on itself. Admit it, this has happened to you, too. You try to veerrrrrrry carefully separate the thing back into a single-layer, usable kitchen accessory but, unless you have the dexterity of a trained surgeon, your attempts only result in a completely useless, crumpled ball of petroleum-based, non-biodegradable product that you should never have bought in the first place.

What, you ask, is my point, exactly?

I now live in a country that sells plastic wrap in boxes that do not come equipped with their very own serrated wrap-cutting edge.

Did you hear me? I NOW LIVE IN A LAND OF CUTTING-EDGE-LESS PLASTIC WRAP!

It's a nightmare, a nightmare, I tell you. So now the entire plastic wrap experience, every single time, is perfectly hellish from beginning to end. Purgatory never looked so good. Whoever designed these cutting edgeless boxes was clearly entirely unfamiliar with human anatomy, with the physics of plastic wrap, or both. I don't know about him, but I only have two hands. If you have to cut the wrap yourself, using scissors or a knife, you have to: hold the roll in one hand, and with the other hand find the edge of the wrap and figure out in which direction to separate it from the roll (because the lack of serrated lip leaves you no dangling wrap to grab); play out some wrap and hold it tautly (and I challenge anyone to successfully detach an entire width of wrap from the roll one-handedly and play it out in one piece); and then cut. That adds up to THREE hands. At least.

I have been trying to think of some ways around this I-only-have-two-hands-but-need-three problem. Here's what I have so far:

(1) You could rig up some device that would immobilize the roll, thereby reducing the operation to a two-handed affair, but that might require (shudder!) tools and some mechanical aptitude.

(2) You could call in your spouse, child, or a random passer-by and have that person perform one part of the operation, but that would leave a perfectly good fourth hand unused. Besides, it's hard to fit more than one person at a time into a Dutch kitchen if either one of them will need to engage in movement.

(3) You can, using one hand, attempt to separate and rip whatever size piece of wrap you need off the roll using sheer force. Unless you have paws bigger than Rachmaninoff's, you cannot possibly get hold of and hold taut the full width of the roll in one hand, so you wind up with a much-too-small piece of wrap, in a shape for which modern geometry has no name. Then you quickly drop the roll from your other hand in your hurry to two-handedly grasp the wrap and get it around the target before it balls up on itself; fail, and throw roll of wrap across the room while loudly exercising your vocabulary of impolite words.

Number 3 is the approach I pick, every single time. But if anyone can suggest other options, I'm willing to consider them.