I spent fifteen minutes with a pair of scissors, a knife, and my teeth trying to open a phone charger. The plastic won. I now own an expensive decorative sculpture that occasionally charges my phone if I hold it at exactly the right angle and apologize to it first.

You spend three minutes searching for the "tear here" arrow on a phone charger box, find it, pull with the confidence of someone who's done this before, and somehow end up with a two-inch rip that goes sideways into the actual product. Now you're standing in your kitchen with a bleeding thumb and a USB cable that's technically fine but feels personally offended.

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.