I refuse to believe that I am the only person to whom this happens on a regular basis:

Checking the sell by date on a tin or a can…

You start by looking at the label, where you would think somebody logical would place the sell by date, so that it can be found easily. But no, of course the sell by date isn’t there: why on earth would they print it on the label, where somebody might find it?

So you turn the can around in your hands and you read the label a few times, scanning for those elusive words and discovering instead a host of ingredients that you didn’t know you’d been consuming all this time, and by the third turn you’re beginning to think that maybe it’s better to eat the stuff and keel over after all than to spend the best years of your life trying to find the damn date.

But damn it, you started this and you’re going to finish it!

Okay, so having turned the tin this way and that, you finally run out of places to look at. So then you check the bottom of the tin, which is ridiculous of course because who the hell would write the sell by date on the bottom of a tin? But no, there it is, in full shining glory: the very thing you were looking for, right on the bottom of the tin.

But no, hang on! It’s not the bloody sell by date is it? The print actually says: check top (or side, or elsewhere) for the sell by date!

Why on Earth do they do this? What a waste of print! Why bother going to the trouble of printing on the item: check other side for sell by date? Why not just write the sell by date there in the first place! It uses a less ink! You could have the sell by date printed on both places - in the place where they’re going to hide it anyway, and in the place where they’re going to write ‘check on the side for sell by date’! This way they save on ink and production costs, and you stay sane! It’s a win win!

And if that’s too much trouble, why not use a bright orange (or yellow) label to write the sell by date in?

And yes, this just happened to me AGAIN.