Monday, October 24, 2005

A cautionary tale

If you're in the grocery store choosing a carton of eggs and a stray, broken egg oozes out of the side of one of the cartons into your hand and you're compelled to use hand sanitizer to sanitize your eggy hand, make sure you let the hand sanitizer dry before you pick up a bag of milk.

Why? Well, if you don't, the dark blue ink from the bag will transfer itself to your hand. This won't be as much of a problem for you if you happen to be one of those organized-type people who actually carries tissues with you. But if you aren't one of those people, you'll briefly consider ripping open a maxi pad you've discovered during your frantic digging that was left over from the last time you needed to carry one around in your purse. Once you've dismissed that as a simply terrible idea for so very many reasons, you'll decide to use hand sanitizer to attempt to clean up. This will only serve to dilute the ink and pass it to the hand that wasn't tainted in the first place and you'll end up with two blue, wet hands. You'll search vainly for something to dry them on and end up opting for the inside of your jacket pocket and an old shopping list. You'll be cursing yourself while at the same time fervently praying that no one is watching this ridiculous one-woman Blue Man show.

In the end you'll sigh, and just decide to pretend that nothing is wrong and that the dark blue stains on your hands are virtually invisible. You'll hope against hope that no one will notice and, that if they do, they'll think nothing of the strange staining that looks suspiciously like security tag ink.

The good thing is that when you finally get into your car and tear into the Snickers bar you're pretty certain you've earned, you'll make sure not to touch the chocolate with your eggy smurf hands and you'll enjoy every bite of it. You might not have a strategy for dealing with broken eggs and milk bag ink, but fortunately you'll always have your wits about you when it comes to chocolate.

Well, you will if you're anything like me, anyway.

3 comments:

Catherine said...

Thank you! I haven't laughed like that in a while.

Ann Howell said...

LOL! That did give me quite a giggle :) Smurf hands!

grumpyABDadjunct said...

LOL! You've left me sorely tempted to break into our Halloween candy...