2,500 gone but not forgotten

A poster hangs over the urinal at the men’s bathroom at the restaurant/sports bar where I celebrated my buddy ol’ pal Michael’s birthday last night. I don’t know if advertisers think that women also crave random information while relieving themselves, but this particular poster is somewhat common in men’s rooms at bars of this sort. The poster lists “interesting” facts under the heading “Thought you’d like to know:” Each fact is apparently so amazing that they all require exclamation points. There are probably 15 or so unbelievable facts on the poster. You can imagine that reading each one with the intensity required by the exclamation point can be quite exhausting. Especially when you weren’t expecting the exclamation point and then you have to re-read a ho-hum statement such as: The first bar code was on a pack of Wrigley’s gum.- incredulously: The first bar code was on a pack of Wrigley’s gum! (No Way!) While most of the facts were stupid, I did find one to be particularly intriguing. Check it:

Over 2,500 left-handed people a year are killed from using products made for right-handed people!

Come again? How could this be? Let’s explore this a little further. There are three items I immediately think of when it comes to products made specifically for righties vs. southpaws. The first is scissors.

I have few elementary school memories more painful than the frustration I felt on those days in art class when I arrived at the scissor bin too late and had to try and cut construction paper with lefty scissors. However, given the predominance of righty scissors this only happened once or twice a year. Lefties, on the other hand-quite literally- probably get stuck using righty scissors all the time growing up. I imagine that the cumulative aggravation that this causes them would be enough to cause tens of hundreds to stab themselves with the practically unusable off-handed scissors. We must keep in mind though that elementary school children tend not to use the sharpest of scissors. Thus I imagine a significant majority of those exasperated lefties survive those stabbings. Liberally, I’ll estimate 1,000 lefty deaths come at the hand of righty scissors annually. That leaves us with 1,500 unaccounted fatalities.

The second item that comes to mind when thinking righty-lefty is school desks. You know, the ones with the L-shaped desktops. These usually don’t come into play until middle school. (Up until that point, at least in the Shaker Heights School system, kids had the desks that opened up for you to put all your school supplies inside. Did anyone else regularly wage an epic organizing battle with the contents inside their desk in order to be able to fully close the lid/top?) In middle school and high school classes or at the occasional meeting, detention, driving school class etc. lefties probably find themselves at righty desks more often than they desire. The only scenario in which I can see this situation resulting in lefty casualty is if the lefty forgets he’s seated at a righty desk and goes to rest his head on his elbow atop the desk or tries to put his head down on this desk and does so with such momentum that when the wooden desktop isn’t there as he expected he falls out of his desk and hits his head on the ground causing hemorrhaging in his brain. Since I made a liberal estimate with the scissor-related RIP’s I’ll conservatively guess that the aforementioned desktop mishaps end in ultimate tragedy a mere 1,200 times per year. (This reminds me of a story about resting my head on the desk at driving school back in the day. I’ll have to write about it. Don’t worry it didn’t end in my death.)

By my foolproof calculations 300 left handed martyrs every year still need to be recognized. Who are these unfortunate souls? That brings me to my third and final item that pops up when hand specific products are discussed. It is of course, the baseball mitt.

The scene is an ugly and familiar one. You are at the company picnic. A softball game takes shape. Predictably there are fewer baseball gloves than eager players. In an impressive display of inter-squad cooperativeness several gloves are passed from team to team between innings. However, one of those pass offs will prove costly. Karen is a lefty. Karen didn’t bring her glove, heck she probably doesn’t even own one. Uncoordinated as she may be, Karen wants in on the action. Karen thinks she can use a righty glove, no sweat. Besides she’s playing so deep in right field it’s sure to be a moot point. But it isn’t. A towering fly ball off the bat of the heavyset new guy comes Karen’s way, distracted by the encouraging words of her fellow outfielder “you got it Karen, easy does it” Karen forgets which hand of hers is gloved. At the last second, as the ball is plummeting down at her, she realizes she has her bare hand raised to catch the ball. Instinctually she retracts her arm leaving her defenselessly exposed. The ball strikes Karen in the soft spot on her head killing her instantly. The picnic is ruined. 300 watermelons per year go to waste, thanks to “Karens” and her borrowed righty gloves. (Just so you know “Karen” could be a guy. It’s unlikely, maybe 27 out of 300 Karen’s a year are dudes, but I wanted to address that for fear of gender stereotyping accusations.)

Well there you have it. A nice thorough explanation of an interesting fact on a poster hanging above a urinal in an Upper East Side bar. I bet those facts are bogus. If I ever see that poster again I’m checking the source. Join me tomorrow as I probe the fact that the average man spends 3,350 hours of his life shaving 8.4 meters of stubble. I’d rather just grow the 27.5 ft. long beard and save all that time.

Exree Hipp plays for the title tonight. I’m going to wear a suit on the sideline. Go Hipp.