A Cautionary Tale

Yesterday I worked early, so I planned to go to the gym afterwards, and accordingly brought my gym bag to work. Around 10:30 a.m. I opened the bag to check my cell phone for messages, and thought I smelled something extremely pleasant. My thought process was, approximately, "Gee, that's nice. It smells kind of like raspberry jam OH SHIT IT'S DEMETER RASPBERRY JAM!"

A whole half-ounce bottle of Demeter Raspberry Jam, as it turned out, which had mischievously unscrewed its own cap and dumped itself all over the inside of one of the end pockets, and left no friendly drop to help me after. Luckily, it's a well-made gym bag, and the ends are lined with a pretty impermeable synthetic rubber (presumably so you can carry sodden and/or stinky gym clothes home if you should happen to forget to bring a plastic bag in which to insulate them). Unluckily, my keys were inside that pocket, and I had to remove them and wash them, and I got Raspberry Jam all over my hands and could smell it all day, which isn't a bad thing except that I was convinced it was coming from the gym bag itself (which it wasn't) and was therefore incommoding customers and co-workers alike. And then after I got to the bus stop I couldn't find my keys because after washing them I'd left them in the frame shop.

In the end I didn't even get to go to the gym, because I ended up working later than expected and by the time I was done I'd been on my feet all day and couldn't face a workout (and was hungry to boot, as I hadn't brought any lunch).

Lessons:

1) The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men et cetera et cetera.
2) Buy a good-quality gym bag.
3) Don't carry screw-cap bottles of fragrance inside your totables unless you plan to check the caps on a very regular basis.

Also, Demeter should make their labels out of plastic, or at least plasticize the paper labels they do use, because as soon as a droplet trickles down the outside (which it will), it begins to dissolve the ink, leaving the bottle in kind of a mess. Not as bad a mess as the Raspberry Jam label was after the contents had marinated it, but still not attractive.