Forget Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or even John Ashcroft - I have seen the face of true evil, and it is called the Jiffy Bag.

For those of you not in the know - O, blessed ignorance! - the Jiffy Bag was invented by Satanic forces as a low-cost mailing alternative to envelopes with bubble cushioning (or good old-fashioned cardboard boxes with crumpled newspapers or even styrofoam peanuts). Jiffy Bags use shredded waste paper as their padding material, which I'm sure sounds great and earth-friendly in these conservationist times. The problem, however, lies in the opening. For you see, another key aspect of the Jiffy Bag's cheapness is that they're extremely flimsy. Even when you can open one correctly by pulling the easy-pull tab, the padded walls rupture about half of the time, showering you with a fluffy cloud of 60-100% post-consumer recycled material, which looks great on your dress clothes and tastes even better when you inadvertently suck it down into your lungs. Of course, many times you don't even have a chance of opening a Jiffy Bag correctly, as the fiends who inflict this form of delivery upon you diabolically decide to compound their malfeasance by covering the easy-pull tab with a layer or two of packing tape, for reasons that confound any sense of logic or human decency. Handling such a Jiffy Bag is an object lesson in no-win situations, a true test of character under fire.

So far today, I'm not exactly maintaining a passing grade...