Last year, I encountered a life hack video with a claim just stupid enough to catch my attention: that I’m using can openers the wrong way.

“Impossible,” I thought while clicking through to verify my mastery of simple machinery.

I was shocked – floored, really – when the video proved itself correct. I looked back at my life with a profound sense of shame.

Here’s what I learned:

Instead of holding an opener to the side of a can (and cutting a jagged circle through the top), you should hold the dial above the can cutting the entire top (smooth edges and all) off from the base.

This makes a pop-top lid similar to the cardboard tubes Mike Brady used to hold his architectural blueprints on The Brady Bunch, or to Minute Maid frozen juice concentrate cans sold around 1991.

The next time I took my opener to a can, I was shocked how easy it was to use correctly. My new method meant no longer worrying about prying the jagged lid up from the can of tomatoes.

This solved a real problem in my life. Nearly every lid of every can I’ve ever opened has fallen into the contents below leaving me to pick a jagged edge out of my food at great risk to my personal safety.

My go-to-method was using either a fork’s prawn or a barbecue skewer to pry the lid back up without cutting my finger.

Seeing the top of the can fall into my food had long grossed me out. I know my kitchen pantry is clean, but I also know that this can was previously at a canning factory, then placed on a pallet and put into transit where it rumbled about for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles until settling into the back of a supermarket, and eventually on a shelf.

I also know that rats leave a trail of urine everywhere they walk and that they’re commonly found in warehouses. Therefore, I assume that the top of every can in my pantry has, at some point in the chain of custody, picked up a trace amount of rat urine.

I don’t clean the tops of my canned goods because I’m not insane, but I do silently worry for a microsecond before shrugging it off. This life hack removed my microsecond of rat-bladder-leakage anxiety.

I’m drawn into these life hack videos the same way I used to get suckered into infomercials as a kid. There isn’t that much difference between learning how to MacGyver a little extra toothpaste out of a tube and being convinced that a quality haircut is just a Flowbee away.

But like an As-Seen-On-TV product, once the novelty wore off, the life hack got moved to a dusty shelf in the back of my brain.

Just a few weeks later I realized halfway through opening a can that I was using my old method. And I couldn’t have cared less.

I paused before opening a second can and (with rat bladders still in the back of my mind) decided to use the new method. But this time the mystique was gone.

Additionally, my newly critical eye noticed fibers from the cut label had fallen into my can of no-salt-added petite diced tomatoes.

I wondered, which is worse to ingest: trace amounts of imaginary rat urine or actual bits of can-label ink and glue?

It’s the last time I opened a can from the outside.

Life hacks aren’t about creating lasting solutions to everyday problems. They’re about seeing something familiar in a new and unexpected way.

Opening a can is generally a rather tedious and unremarkable task. But, for a short period of time, it mesmerized me providing unexpected delight. Until I almost ate label glue.

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