21 October 2008

Bobby Pins


Something woke me at 7:57 am. It was not my alarm. No, that had long since failed. It must have been my conscience. Or my instinctive fight-or-flight mechanism. The thing that sometimes motivates me when nothing else will:

OK, the fear of getting fired.

I woke, I turned to my trusty phone and saw the numbers 7-5-7. "What?" I said. And then for good measure, "What?" El Esposo mumbled something and turned over. I was supposed to catch the 8:05 bus.

As I leapt and ran across to the bathroom, I briefly considered going as is. But then I remembered that I had not showered post-yoga last night. Cute as my hair looked curled in a nest atop my head, I was not going to work stinky. We have no showers there and grossing out the client is not good business practice. My best hope was the 8:17 bus.

About 8:13 I was clean and dressed and looking at my partially dry, mostly wild-looking hair style in the mirror. No time for niceties such as hair product, I turned to that trusted and true standard of hair taming, the bobby pin. Grabbed a few on my way out the door, ran all the way to the stop, and have been living fabulous ever since. Wikipedia says this hair fastener became the standard in the twenties when the bob was in style. What I could not find out, though, was exactly when it was invented.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Sooo, did you make it?

The web seems full of lots of times the bobby pin was invented. I even found a compilation page of all the times the internet says it was invented here:

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1354210

Hmmmm. I looked for something in patents but just kept reading till my eyes blurred. Dunno sister, but they sure are handy in a pinch.

abby said...

The OED, which I have access to at work, says the word bobby pin was first used in 1936.

I would have asked el esposo to drive you to the Metro instead of letting him fall back asleep. I guess that's just me.

mj said...

The OED contradicts pretty much all the sources I found online that said it was made popular in the twenties. I think the jury is still out.

I did make the bus. I was definitely a bit surly to El Esposo that morning, but it's really only a couple minutes faster from the metro, so I let him sleep.