I don’t recall seeing many of those push buttons, having handled them over some years. I think there are some, but I packed it away again.
Most if not nearly all, pull tab.
Man... when I ripped off that pull tab... it felt familiar. The ring once removed, sort of “stuck” embedded in my finger from the force to remove it (if you remember how they did that).
Wild. I have a few more I should pull... can’t believe they haven’t exploded.
Talking about those pull tabs gave me a flashback.
Many years ago I was over in the Bahamas on a diving trip. There was this older couple who had retired and moved over to the Bahamas and started a diving business. The wife of this couple was infatuated with green moray eels. Their dive business centered around this.
This lady had been going out to the reef and feeding these green morays daily (sometimes multiple times a day) for a long time. These eels got to the point that they never moved from this one area... they just learned to sit tight and wait for the crazy lady to bring them their meals. They were big too... one of them is the biggest eel I have ever seen. She got these monsters to the point that they ate out of her hand... and the super giant one would let her wrap her arms around it's neck like a hug. It was so big that she could barely get her arms all the way around it. It was crazy. I had seen pics... but I wanted to see this in person.... so I booked a trip with them.
At that time, pull tops were no longer available in the US. But over in the Bahamas they were still out. I remember being surprised to actually see a pull top can. It was just me and my girlfriend on the boat with this couple. As we were headed out to the reef where the eels were waiting for food I pulled the tab off of some kind of canned beverage. I also remember thinking... damn, what do I do with this tab now that I pulled it off... it had been a while since I had to even think about that. So,,, I casually flipped the stupid thing over the side of the boat. Holy Fuck Batman was that a mistake!
As soon as I tossed it overboard... the crazy eel lady starts freaking out. She screams to the husband to stop the boat, and at the same time she is swan diving over the side of the boat that I had tossed the tab over. She went down with no mask or fins and did her best to try and find that tab. After many attempts to find it, she gave up and climbed back in the boat. She then starts telling me how she feared that a fish might swallow that shiny tab as it made it's way to the bottom. She was super concerned about it. She was a true protector of sea life. I saw her point... but especially back in those days, I thought she was looney. Those pull off tabs really where a problem though now that you think about it. Hell, even Jimmy Buffet sang about blowing out his flip flop on a pop top. It's great that those things were done away with.
That couple ended up having to close their business not long after I went out and watched this lady feed and hug the eels. One of those nasty fuckers damn near killed her one day when it aggressively wanted to eat.
Down at the house in the Keys we just left... there are 3 green morays that live in the rocks along the sea wall in the backyard. They wait for the daily fish carcasses that I would toss in the water when we'd clean fish. They will stick their heads completely out of the water trying to get the scraps. My boys were hand feeding them until I told them about that crazy lady. After that, we would feed them using a gaff so nobody would lose a finger or hand. They are very strong... we even started to play tug of war with them.
