An Open Letter to the JanPak Backpack Company

To Whom it May Concern:

Enclosed, please find what remains of one of your Compackteam-brand hiking backpacks. Please note the condition of said backpack, purchased brand new in the USA in September of this year. This condition is what we in the software development business usually designate as “assy.” (I write accounting software, if that helps.)

You will note that the shoulder straps and top “grab” handle on the bag have completely torn free of the backpack, the loop straps on the top are coming loose, the drawstring fabric that secures the main compartment is ripped halfway off, and one of the fastener straps from the front is also gone.

Where, you may be asking yourself, did this person take our fine product, to leave it in such a state? Was it perhaps the deepest jungles of the Congo, where he and his traveling companion were set upon by fierce, fanged carnivores and devotees of the now-defunct Mobutu regime? Was it in the hideous heart of darkest India, where Bengal tigers slashed at it with their claws and Thuggee cultists hacked at it with machetes?

No, I tell you that it was a place far worse than these, a place fraught with terrors the mere mention of which could stop a frail mans heart, a sadist’s paradise, a place where civilization as we know it is urinated upon and cast into the very pit of Hell.

I speak, of course, of the Florence airport, Firenze, Italy.

There, after surviving a harrowing journey along the automatic luggage trolley at baggage claim, it vomited its shoulder straps forth with a soul-shattering rip that split the night. This occurred when I engaged it in a dangerous maneuver I’m sure you don’t recommend to your customers, a move I like to refer to as “putting it on.” Three or four times previously, I subjected your bag to such horrific treatment!

And again, at our bed and breakfast in the Tuscan countryside (motto: “Yankee Backpack Go Home, Or Else We’ll Bring Back Fascism”), where we wheeled the bag in on a luggage cart purchased in Florence (cost: $25), I, with my mighty 5’ 10”, 150-pound frame, damn near ripped the fabric off the top of the bag using a Korean self-defense technique known as “putting stuff in it.”

Oh, how my wife marveled! We made love on top of the bag then and there while singing praises to Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds!

It was then that I noticed another one of the straps had come loose and was now laying on the floor, and one of the straps on the very top of the bag was starting to come loose. Evidently the strain of sitting on a luggage cart was more than the poor thing could bear.

So one might assume that I am writing to complain about this backpack. But NO! Quite the contrary! For I perceive the true purpose for which this bag was designed: Performance Art.

In this endeavor, Sirs and/or Madams, I hope I am the first to say: Job. Well. Done. For you have gone far beyond the pulings and flailings of the average so-called artist and entered into the Halls of Legend. You did not just give me a backpack – no, good Gentlemen and/or Ladies and possibly one or two possessed of non-specific genitalia – no, you have also given me the Theatre of the Absurd.

I perceive now in retrospect that the explosive force of the bag’s initial deterioration was in fact your proud and subtly ironic announcement of the futility of existence in the face of Void and Nothingness, that the ripping of the fabric was meant to represent the tearing of my very mortal soul as my bourgeois theistic pretensions likewise strained to the point of ripping and crashed at my feet.

Not with a bang, my dear Misters and Missuses and various silicon-based life forms – not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Ah, but the real shock came, as it sometimes does in wine tastings (and we tasted a lot of wines around Tuscany, where the very air dissolved the bag’s fabric) on the “back end,” the aftertaste, the reprise at the end of the musical. It was then that I realized your real purpose in hiring armless, blind, mentally retarded corpses to design and build your fine line of products: Showmanship. And your choice of crepe paper and used condoms as the materials for its manufacture was quite the masterful stroke, a sort of bawdy and cheeky stab at the United States’ current foreign policy.

In short, Bros and Hos and assorted clockwork humanoid automata: I applaud you. Never before have I been so moved, and so moved to think.

If this was not your intention, however, I humbly beg your forgiveness. I am but a humble Philistine. I also ask that you refund me the full price of the bag, $25 US for the luggage cart, and another $30 US for the suitcase we had to buy from a street vendor in Rome, so that unholy load of my clothing would no longer threaten the bag’s spider-web-and-dental-floss structure – because clearly, your efforts are wasted on such small minds as mine.

But fear not, for I intend to ask every writer and blogger I know whether or not they share my interpretations of the events I have described above. I hope to learn from their respective analyses.


Yours &c.,
Matthew Reed