I Solve One Of My Life’s Great Mysteries

Ugliest photo of me ever. Look at that honker! The eyebrows! The top lip! (The glasses?) Not to mention that great big black ink smudge.

There are things which happen in my life for which I have no satisfactory explanation. Why do I own so many odd socks? Why does the chance of a car breaking down increase the further from home I drive? Why doesn’t my wife want sex all the time? Why aren’t all coffee baristas created equal?

It’s the bane of my life how two baristas from the same establishment, using the same machine with the same beans, can create two so very different brews. This morning, I’m pleased to say, the brew was excellent.

Aside from these, and the mystery of why have I been working in banks for twenty odd years when I was clearly meant to be a rock star, I’ve had the oddest thing happening to me at work for months now.

“You’ve got ink on your nose,” someone at work will point out to me at some time in the morning.

I’ll race off to look in the mirror and, sure enough, the knob on the end of my nose will have a black smudge. And let me tell you, the knob on my nose does not need the added attention: it’s already hard to miss.

My ritual at this point has been to rub it off and frown at myself in the mirror, trying to figure out what I’ve done to have this happen. I work in a bank so I have stamps and a black ink pad, a multitude of black pens and, although I use it less often, a thick black nikko. My life at work revolves around black ink.

I’ll look to see if there’s ink on my fingers and try to figure out if I’ve scratched my nose when I was holding a stamp.

This has even become a bit of a ‘thing’ at work with some of my colleagues as we’ve tried to come up with a solution. Hey, banking is boring: we’re always looking for distractions.

After months of this happening a couple times a week, today we finally got our answer.

“You’ve got ink on your nose,” a fellow staff member told me.

I did my mirror/wipe/frown/think bit and then went back to my work. Trying to push the whole thing out of my mind I picked up my coffee and took a sip.

“You’ve got ink on your nose,” a different staff member pointed out to me. Then she squealed. “I know what it is!”

And even as she said it I realized the answer had been right in front of me the whole bloody time.

It was my coffee!

Or more specifically, the two sugars I have in my coffee.

Whether or not I was to have an inked nose each day has ultimately depended on where the lady at the cafe wrote my request for two sugars.

So mystery solved. Which is great.

Although truth be told, if I’d had a choice, I’d rather have solved that whole sex thing 😉 

 Bruce Devereaux hangs out at his:

’BIG FAMILY little income’  Facebook Page

 ’raising a family on little more than laughs’

 

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