Key Kerfuffle

The aggravating slabs of metal

Although I may not be a believer in the tooth fairy, or Santa Claus, I am a firm believer in the key pixies. My belief is that whenever I am looking away, or when I momentarily blink, lightning fast fairy like creatures jump out of thin air (through inter-dimensional time portals) and grab my keys, phone, wallet etc. and move it to somewhere incredibly obscure so I can never find it whenever I need it the most, before quickly exiting the plane of existence via the time portals. These pixies are pretty strong being able to move a wallet full of enough loose change to crush them, but they seem to have enough speed to remove any important possession from its natural resting place whenever the moment should arise.

The only piece of evidence against my theory is that sometimes, I can be a bit haphazard with where I place my keys, possibly leading to me just forgetting their location. But that’s only a minor detail.

Keys are often the source of irritation in many people’s lives. They seem to wander around like cows in a field and they always know the best place to hide, like a hide-and-seek obsessed toddler. I still believe in the pixies though. Keys are just plain annoying, making simple life activities such as opening the door to your own home that much more challenging.

Putting a key into a door can sometimes be much more irritating than expected. You try and insert the key one way up and it doesn’t seem to fit. Your utterly intelligent mind quickly works out that the key must be inserted the other way up, as there are only two options of the orientation of the key. But when you try it the other way up, it doesn’t seem to fit then either. Confused, you try putting the key in the original way up and miraculously it works. The laws of physics have just failed in front of you, a strangely shaped lump of metal has disproved the whole of your scientific learning. Some things just can’t be explained.

Every so often, you feel the need to check that your keys are still in your pocket, just in case. You start patting your pocket and there’s nothing key shaped there. Paranoia sinks in and your heart drops, so low that you could probably give birth to it if there was such a mechanism in the human body. You begin to pat your various pockets as if you were a bongo drum, hoping to find those damned lumps of metal jangling around there somewhere. Usually you find them when you hurt your hand as it slams into their pointed jagged bumps and the panic attack is over. They were just in a different pocket than expected. The terrifying ordeal is over quicker than it began.

Keys are just aggravating slabs of metal, existing for irritation only. I look forward to the day when fingerprint identification is used instead of those hopeless metallic shapes, although that will probably be the day when I lose all my fingers in a horrific accident involving a kitchen knife, alcohol and extreme hunger for a cheese sandwich. Then I’ll be annoyed once again.