As I waited for a video appointment to begin, I noticed the small miscellaneous pile I had set on the desk in preparation for an upcoming trip. I was happy to see that a small tube of hand cream was one of the items, my hands were already dry in mid-November.
Keeping my eyes on my iPad screen so as not to miss the person I was meeting with when they joined the Zoom, I unscrewed the lid of the hand cream, squeezing a very generous amount onto the back of my left hand. Immediately I smelled mint. Just as quickly, I identified the white mound on my hand as toothpaste, not hand cream.
Assessing my options in a nano-second, I knew that even though the bathroom was not far away, the start time of the meeting did not allow me to take a chance and leave the room. What did I have within reach to clean myself up? The metaphor “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube” was never more true. Sliding my chair back about a foot, I repeatedly grabbed a tissue from its box until I had four or five. Rolling back to the desk, I layered the tissues on top of each other to create a single cloth up to the challenge (hopefully) of wiping the thick, sticky glob off my hand, doing so before the meeting started.
Distracted for the first few minutes of the appointment, I couldn’t stop thinking about toothpaste. But it could have been worse. I would rather have plaque-free hands than moisturized teeth.
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