I spent twenty minutes with a rotisserie chicken's clamshell, convinced I was three millimeters away from cracking the code. By minute twenty-one, I'd created a crime scene that would make a forensics team weep—shredded plastic everywhere, a chicken that looked like it had survived an air strike, and the scissors bent at an angle that suggested I'd been trying to open a titanium safe. My partner walked in, took one look at the wreckage, and asked if the chicken had fought back. I told her the chicken won.

I spent fifteen minutes attacking a phone charger cable with my fingernails like a feral cat, then finally resorted to my teeth. My dentist asked why my front tooth had a tiny plastic dent in it. I said, "Samsung." He nodded like that explained everything.

I stood there for three minutes wrestling with a pack of scissors, my fingernails screaming, before I realized I needed scissors to open the scissors. The manufacturer had won. I placed them gently back in the box like a hostage negotiator and ordered a chainsaw online instead—at least that one came in a cardboard sleeve I could just rip.