Crap Management

When I worked at W magazine, the beauty editor was a woman named Dana Wood. Dana was (is) petite, blonde, curvaceous and extremely salt of the earth. At first I was terrified of her and then (as frequently happens) we became really good friends. In fact, this cycle has repeated itself so often that I now see being terrified of someone as a portent of an ecstatic friendship.
Anyway, as beauty editor, Dana used to get bags n bags n bags of dumb shit from companies. It's part of the ecology of that world, that little bags with tissue paper, press releases, and absurd complicated boxes go flying out from the various mother ships--and yes, I know I am mixing my metaphors--every day. Dana would devote a good 20 percent of her time to what she called "crap management," which went like this:
One: cut a hole in the bag. Oh no wait--wrong.
Anyway: open bag, remove fluff, glance cursorily at product, toss bag, add press kit to pile, put lame product in giveaway box. Repeat six or seven times daily. Two months later, give lame product to co-workers who will fall upon it as if they were starving and eye cream was pizza.
I experienced it directly when I went to Paris and became a beauty editor. I'd get up from my desk, go to the bathroom, out on the balcony to have a smoke, and come back to my desk. In my absence, at least three bags would have appeared on my chair. Like tribbles. I grew to hate product and more specifically, the misguided extremes that beauty companies would go to to package this product. Die-cuts and plastic containers and specially-molded boxes to hold the harnesses that held the packaging that contained the vial of precious fluid. I mean COME ON people, THIS is what we're sacrificing the rain forests to? Special editions of Gaultier Male?
Anyway, today I had two instances of severe crap management/overpackagaing. I don't want to dis the companies by name because they're both generally devoted to good design, but one involved a placemat sized piece of rigid plastic that will do nothing but go into the garbage, and the other was a color-wheel sort of thing that I struggled with impatiently before it joined the aforementioned placemat. I could start my own little Fresh Kills at this rate.