It’s not a petty thing if it drives you nuts

When I was working at various newspapers, I was sometimes accused of being petty, of wielding the journalistic pen and using strong arm tactics worthy of a dictatorship in a Third World country.

Denying that makes no sense, just as the accusations, then and now, make no sense. People believe what they want to believe.

Always a proponent of pithy editorial comment that was aimed at creating an environment for thought, I, and a majority of editors that passed through the News Messenger doors, wrote editorials and columns to create a bias for action.

That does not mean those written words didn’t create some heartburn in some folks. Some were assuredly meant to do just that.

I can only conjure up one column that was, in my opinion, then and now, petty. It wasn’t about any politician, or local group, the local school system, postal service, city administration, or any subject that most folks might consider to be fodder for pettiness.

I remember going on a tangent more than 20 years ago about a pet peeve of mine and more than one person told me I was being petty and petulant. If something is so severely intimidating and irritating that it makes you want to take a 2x4 and beat some poor stranger, then, in my opinion, it is certainly not a petty matter.

It is my personal belief that every single person on this planet with an IQ over 12 has at least one pet peeve. My main pet peeve is those stupid little paper stickers applied to fruit and vegetables in grocery stores.

You know. Those little red-and-white or green-and-white stickers with the dumb numbers that are attached to the skin of fruit or vegetables with a mixture of Super Glue and Quikcrete.

Certain fruits – pineapple and kiwi come to mind -- used to be exempt due to outer skin covering, but even those has succumbed to the insidious SSP (Stupid Sticker Program).

Yeah, yeah, I know why they put them on there: Inventory control. I don’t care. It’s not rocket science to look at existing batches of veggies and fruit and order when the stash gets low. That’s the way it was done for centuries before scanners, and it by gosh worked.

As a consumer, it’s a rip off. The stickers add additional weight to the item and I don’t want to pay the extra freight, so to speak. The stickers may be lightweight, but the psychological weight is very, very heavy.

And, the stickers cost money and, assuredly, that cost is passed on via higher consumer prices.

Those stickers are the same thing as … well, parsley. Who needs parsley? Who eats parsley? Yet consumers are forced to spend millions of dollars a year buying parsley that has the nutritional value of mucous and is used strictly for decoration.

I propose a two-prong approach to dealing with this problem: First, join the organization GASOFAV (Get All Stickers Off Fruits and Vegetables). Protest quietly by removing every sticker from offending supermarket items or, for the more adventuresome activist, switch kiwi stickers onto cantaloupes.

Join this fledgling group and help get stickers off fruits and veggies and then we move on to ousting parsley.

If I had my druthers, I would druther see little red-and-white stickers on my mashed potatoes than parsley. The stickers simply taste better.