Skip to main content

Places You Never Thought Of Applying Neosporin To

When I was a young accountant working at a Vancouver CA (insert CPA if you are American) firm, I was introduced to various surprisingly alternative uses of duct tape by a talented, tall, blond assistant.

She was so amazingly creative with duct tape that she would somehow incorporate its use into almost all tasks assigned to her (fixing dead un-backed up laptops, torn audit bags, over-full client files, etc...)

This assistant's talents with duct tape were so extensive that legend has it, once she even duct tape a Partner to his office chair... no time thereafter she was promoted to Office Manager, got a gorgeous office with windows and began driving a red sports car to work, while the rest of us accountants, with no imagination whatsoever regarding the uses of duct tape continued to slave away in our cubicles late into the night...

And that was a very important lesson to me as a young new accountant living in the world of GAAP rules and Tax Acts: never shy away from creativity (where it's legally OK to do so).

101 uses for duct tape - I assure you this is not my child!
A few months ago, we planned a trip to Maui.  Everything was going super smoothly, beautifully, and wonderfully according to plans right up to the point of checking-in, when the UrbanToddler's car seat resting nicely atop our luggage on the luggage-cart, plummeted on to her tiny head (I won't bore you with how such a bizarre accident occurred in the first place, suffice it to say, never tell a toddler "Don't Play With The Cart Honey").

In less than an instant my excitement for our vacation was replaced with dread.  And that was even before I saw all the blood.  Fractured Skull, Head Injury, SO MUCH Blood, Stitches, Dizzy, Nausea all began flooding into my head as I sat on the ground and pulled my girl on to my lap.  

For the first time since 9-11, we finally reaped the benefits of added airport security... within a minute fire department, ambulance, and airport security had us surrounded.

In the end, we didn't cancel our trip.  All the lovely people that had rushed to our aid, assured us that the UrbanToddler had simply got a small cut on her scalp... that there is a lot of blood when you break the skin of your scalp because of all the blood vessels in that area.  And that this was nothing that a little dab of Neosporin could not fix!?! 

The UrbanToddler boarded the plane for Maui with a lollipop in her hand, a huge dab of Neosporin on her head, and all her parents' prayers for an uneventful flight at her back.

In the end Neosporin did deliver on its famous 2-Day Challenge, and all the UrbanToddler had to do was to sport an adult sized swim cap on her head (the hotel store did not carry kid size caps), which drew a lot of looks towards her cone shaped head by other hotel guests.


And all she had to say in the end was "everybody loved my bootiful pink hat, MommyDaddy"!

Never say never....

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

FORTY THREE YEARS, SEVEN MONTHS AND FORTY DAYS

My life and the life of every Iranian I know,  is bookended by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It doesn't matter that I was barely old enough to remember this historic event or that I spent the decades that followed it, far far away from Iran, the Revolution of 1979 is a heavy, tacky, cruel bookend that defines who we used to be, who we are and the recurring nightmares and dreams we’ve had for 43 years.  I can pinpoint with certainty the exact month after which a general feeling of displacement settled like sticky dust all over me, my family, my classroom, my teachers, our closest friends, our home, our city… In the years and decades that followed, I never experienced another event that brought such a magnitude of change to the nucleus of life.   Not in Iran, and definitely not after a whole life lived outside of Iran.  Perhaps only recently, the experience of the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic, the significant fear, change and frustration that both events brought to our col

On Donald Trump, Crunchy Bananas and our Children... A "How To" on keeping up Spirits and Sanity

The other morning at breakfast, my four year old looked, yet again somberly, at the breakfast before her.  Despite having enthusiastically selected a hodgepodge of liberally salted hard boiled egg whites on the side of toasted hamburger buns, strawberries and vanilla yogurt and a cup of milk, she still could not bring herself to enjoy her breakfast.  Her face was wrinkled, as was mine with exasperation from yet another failed attempt at assembling a palatable breakfast for my picky eater. This one, she is quite the philosopher.  And before I could ask her why she wasn't eating, she said: "Two Things!"  Holding up two tiny fingers.  "The smells of these foods I picked, don't go with each other! And I wish Donald Trump would magically become Hillary Clinton, and the word (world) would be GREAT again".     Despite our best efforts to protect our children from the anxiety of these times, they are alert and picking up on the mood (and the lingo) in the wor

Safa

I have always loved words.  The way some people love shiny new objects.  As soon as I heard a new word, a word that captured my imagination, my energy, my hundreds of unnamed inner thoughts and feelings, I would latch on to it with fearceness, joy and curiosity.  I have also always been intrigued by how regular old words can be used in an unexpected context and evoke bursts of unexpected feelings in the listener, such as laughter, anticipation or tears.  I would search for those words coming out of the mouths of everyone around me, and mentally catalog them like a dutiful librarian, and await the opportunity to say the words with my own mouth out loud to an audience, or better yet use it in an essay where the teacher could grade it, get a kick out of it, or read it to the whole class.      As a child I always loved the Persian word Safa .   For one thing the word sounds so simple, yet sophisticated and beautiful, and for another, each of my memories of hearing this word is stored in th