Gary Chalk
For the record, I have never ever considered using ‘OMG’ in the headline of my Living Retired columns. However, desperate times call for desperate column titles. This is what I mean…
With so much turmoil in the world these days, you have to wonder what worse could be coming! Well, ‘what worse,’ is here! Brace yourself, because coming in a package to you is—you know I don’t make this stuff up!—silent bubble wrap. Did you hear me? Silent. Bubble. Wrap!
Imagine opening your next Amazon order. You tear open the box and immediately begin squeezing the bubble wrap. ‘POP!’ ‘POP!’ ‘POP!’ But wait. There’s no loud ‘POP!’ Instead, a wimpy ‘puf’—hardly worth the effort.
I discovered silent bubble wrap last week. My wife Jan purchased decorator candles—‘OMG!’ even though this is not a column headline—and left the bubble wrap packaging on the kitchen counter. Of course I did what every mature man does: I began pinching the bubble wrap. Nothing. No ‘POP!’ and no reaction from Jan: “Gary, knock it off!”
How can this be, you say? Isn’t silent bubble wrap an oxymoron? You’re correct, but now is not the time to be a linguist. Instead, we need to face a new reality: the longstanding Christmas morning tradition of men popping the livin’ daylights out of the bubble wrap that came with their wife’s new air fryer has been stifled by silent bubble wrap.
Besides providing packaging protection, original bubble wrap that exploded with a loud ‘POP!’ was a great stress reliever. A study concluded that thirty minutes of popping bubble wrap is the same as a 30-minute full body massage, which proves bubble wrap doesn’t rub people the wrong way.
As a special gift to Jan I like to give her a box of bubble wrap, wrapped in bubble wrap to protect it. She pops it to relieve stress, while I sit in another room popping away to my heart’s content.
Here’s a factoid about bubble wrap. Before being marketed as a method to send your friends around the bend when they are trying to concentrate, bubble wrap was developed to be—again this is true—wallpaper. The ingenious inventors were thinking ‘POP!’ ‘POP!’ ‘POP!’ would drown out all the swearing between you and your spouse while wallpapering the bathroom.
Think about this: will the growth of silent bubble wrap around the world even be heard?
Here is something else inquiring minds want to know: how do the bubble wrap manufacturers package their bubble wrap for shipping? With bubble wrap? At least the old fashion bubble wrap POPPED! if it was damaged during transit, right?
And another question popped into my mind: how will we be able to celebrate National Bubble Wrap Day—it’s a thing—on Jan. 26 in 2026 when the ‘POP!’ has been taken out of the ‘POP!’
If I have my way, good old–fashioned, ear-irritating bubble wrap isn’t going out without a bang! Here at the Living Retired head office I compared the original bubble wrap with the new sissy silent bubble wrap. The difference is like night and day: ‘POPPPP!!!!’ compared to ‘puf.’
Now that original bubble wrap has lost its ‘POP!’ we cannot sit around because next it could be—OMG!—silent whoopee cushions!
Living Retired is written by humor columnist Gary Chalk.