Warning Labels

Growing up I was always tempted to pull the tag off my mattress that blared out “DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.”  My brother Mark tempted me worse by telling me the mattress would blow up if I tore it off.  I literally would rub the label between my fingers at night wondering how big the explosion would be.  Would the blast blow me through the roof and into the lake?  That might be fun.  Even at 10 years old I seriously questioned whether the warning was actually true or just a manufactured government conspiracy.  You see a lot of questionable product warnings on TV especially prescription medicines.  The classics are side effects for treating ezcema that “could cause heart disease, sudden blindness, or even death.”  I find it difficult to square skin rash with death, but the warning comes straight through on the TV commercial regardless.  Life is full of warnings, some real and some imagined, so to live life to the fullest you may need to challenge a few.  The result can’t be too bad, I think.

Exploding fireworks were banned in New York State, so you had to travel to Canada or states like South Carolina to get your little pyro fish mitts on something more exciting than sparklers.  Somehow Mark located Buckeye Fireworks in Ohio who would ship them to New York under cover via UPS.  The only catch was  UPS had to stop by the Ticonderoga Voluteer fire department to let them know.  Soon Mark was lining up so many orders of Black Cats and M-80’s from his friends the UPS truck was dropping off daily shipments to the house.  The enterprise came to a screeching halt, however, when the fire department called my Dad’s law office questioning all of the deliveries.  It’s hard to break a bad habit once it starts, so I decided to make my own sky rocket.  I was looking at a box of kitchen matches one day and read the warning label “lighting more than one match at a time would produce a dangerous large flame”.  To me that meant cut all the match heads off, grind them into powder, put the mix into a toilet paper roll, and viola! you have a rocket.  I was toiling away at my father’s desk, almost finished while looking into the tube when the whole thing burst into flames, knocked me over in the chair, and singed my hair back.  I looked liked Daffy Duck hunting with Elmer Fudd.  Luckily, my mother covered for me, but my father never accepted any of my reasons for the missing eyebrows.

Most warnings you can accept at face value like the ones on ladders or bathing with curling irons, but there seems to be so many now it’s hard to keep track of, let alone know they exist.  Worse yet, you’ll see more warnings created for political reasons and less for real dangers.  The most challenging are the prescription drugs especially when you’re taking several scripts at once, along with supplements and food interactions.  Does one combined with another knock out the benefit or double the risk?  I’m only smart enough to pour water out of a boot, so I don’t try to make that decision myself.  If I lined all of my pills up at once and compared the various reactions I wouldn’t take any of them.  Where would that get me?  It be worse than any mattress explosion.  Instead, ask your doctor or pharmacist for the best answer, otherwise the internet will lead you down a rabbit hole.  Trust me when I tell you, burned eyebrows won’t make you a fashion icon.  Slainte.