inpenetrable packaging

Let me first introduce you to my Uncle Ernie, not a true uncle, just a friend uncle. He’s one of those family friends, you know the sort, too much of a friend for the kids to call Mister and of an age, where it would be disrespectful to call him just plain Ernie.
His neighbour called me on a cell phone, ‘It’s Ernie,’ she said, ‘E’s gone to the ‘ospital’.
The line was bad. What followed next, sounded like, ‘E ’s ’ad a fight with a tooth brush!’
I told her I would go and see him but first needed to know if his best friend was okay.
‘What about Mrs. Williams?’ I queried,
‘She’s right as rain’ came the reply, ‘But Ernie says she needs feeding’.
Mrs Williams, has been Uncle Ernie’s closest companion for many years. She is very obese and bereft of large clumps of ginger fur which she leaves behind every time she squeezes through the cat door.
He was sitting in a small room at A and E. The right side of his face was bandaged, his hand covered in thick gauze and apparently, although thankfully hidden from human eyes, a giant band aid covered his upper thigh, a mere two millimetres south of his particulars.
‘What happened?’, I sympathised, Uncle Ernie beckoned me to come closer, not because of any secret squirrel stuff, more due to his total embarrassment. I suppressed a smile.
He was going to lodge a complaint, was determined to make a stink. He would write to Fair Go, contact Paul Henry and send a text message to Helen Clark. I tactfully informed him that Ms Clark was no longer Prime minister. ‘I know that’, he muttered, ‘the U.N should be told’.
Uncle Ernie was in a bad way, of that there was no doubt. The culprit was something we have all encountered; ‘Impenetrable Packaging’.
He had purchased a new tooth brush. He could not get to it, it was hidden in an extra strength, moulded synthetic clamshell packet. Ernie attacked the seams with a pair of scissors. It seems the seams were double thick, super, child and adult proof, nuclear devastation resistant, reinforced plastic.
The tooth brush grinned at him. He put the package on a chopping board and stabbed it with the scissors. The handle broke. He grabbed the carving knife, the sharp one. Forgetting his old carpentry teacher’s advise, ‘Both hands behind the cutting edge’. … the blade rebounded off the package, into the floppy piece of skin between his thumb and index finger.
Thankfully the tooth brush, safe and sound inside its force field, was not splashed with blood. Uncle Ernie hurled the packet across the kitchen and watched, horrified as it bounced off the wall and connected with Mrs. Williams’ tail as she hurtled through the cat door. ‘Me…Ow!’ She exclaimed.
With his left hand wrapped in a tea towel, the determined man placed the package into the vice on his garage work bench and cranked the handle. He was now suffering from ’Wrap Rage’. He smashed the package end with a claw hammer. Thankfully the razor sharp piece of plastic, moving faster than the speed of light, narrowly missed his eye ball. Uncle Ernie’s face was now bleeding.
He wondered why they did not use plastic packaging as a heat shield around the space shuttle.
He grabbed the large pruning shears and sliced the packet in the wrong place. The contents spilled out, in two pieces. Wounded and bleeding the old chap conceded defeat by letting the open pruning shears slip from his hand straight into his left thigh.
Poor Uncle Ernie, his neighbour was right, he certainly did have a fight with a tooth brush and sad to say, he lost!