Like Butter

On Saturday I decided to unpack the speakers for my computer. I found the box they were in, but it was taped up. To open the box I needed a sharp implement. Because I had lost my pocket knife to the TSA, I grabbed the nearest such item in the room: a butter knife.

As I attempted to open the box, the knife just wouldn’t cut the tape.

I thought these things were serrated.

Inspection of the blade revealed that it wasn’t. (Looking in the utensil drawer later, it turns out half of our matching sets of butter knifes are serrated and the other half are not. Weird.)

So I intensified my effort to make this blade slice through the tape.

Then the tape suddenly snapped! And the knife smacked the backside of my left hand between my thumb and forefinger.

At first I thought that since the knife was not serrated (and it is a butter knife) that I had hit my hand with a blunt object and that my hand would sting for a little while. But it turns out the knife actually cut into the skin. Deeply enough to release a trickle of blood.

Unfortunately, the position of the cut was not something that a simple “adhesive bandage” could cover. It took three bandages positioned so that they surround my thumb, otherwise the whole bandage would peel off after about four hours.