A handbag and the mystery its holds

This one is only for us men. You see there are certain facts about women that intrigue us. Here I am narrating one of the zillion.

Ladies - if you still have not been dissuaded by the opening statement and want to continue to read ahead, you can do so only if you agree to willingly give up the rights to present any rebuttal. Neither would you publish an article against us in vengeance.  

One of the modern day wonders is a woman's handbag. 

Let me get to the point straight away. It is not so much about the handbag itself that holds the mystique. It is about what (all) it is engineered to hold.

I may be stirring a hornet’s nest here. So menfolk, in the interests of your marital peace I must caution you - "Try this at your own risk." On second thoughts, maybe "Do not try this at home."

Has your lady ever asked you to quickly reach out to her handbag and give her a pen? Well, you think it is a dumb task which should not even have come your way in the first place. But now that it has come, you will unsuspectingly dip your hand inside that Pandora's box, completely unaware of What Lies Beneath.

Now, since this has happened to me a few times at least - I can tell you that you cannot get better at this task with practice. An average mid-size handbag has about 78 compartments which is roughly about 77 more than you were expecting to negotiate. And each of those compartments have been amply loaded with things that make you wonder if your lady was setting up an emergency response system to counter an impending apocalypse. And we were blissfully unaware. Such idiots!

Now mind you that it has been a while that you were assigned a rather simple task of fetching a pen from a handbag. So pressure has started to show on you by this time because you have only been able to reach the 26th compartment in the last 10 minutes. You are going through a multitude of emotions. You are embarrassed at your overall failure, angry at finding her eyebrow pencil and mistaking it to be the prized pen, happy because you found that elusive cheque book you were searching for the last 3 years (tucked inside one corner of the 17th compartment) and astonished at how she manages all this junk on a daily basis.

There are two possibilities at this stage. Either your lady has forgotten about the frivolous task and busy managing other chores in which case you can take the remaining part of the day to find your eureka moment (read 'pen'). Or on a bad day she will be standing right behind you staring at the entire mess being created. That she is grossly upset will be putting things diplomatically. It is more like "You moron! Which part of your body would you like to lose first?"

But you are a man. You confront her and argue that she had misrepresented facts. It was not a ‘task’; it was a 'mission'. Not sure if even Indiana Jones could have unraveled this mystery. And considering everything the expected time to complete was quite less (55 minutes). Your lady's response - A high decibel noise which freaks out your neighbors German shepherd. Woof Woof!

Now you are irate. You challenge her that if she is so confident can she credibly demonstrate that indeed there was a pen to be found in 2 minutes? 

Bad question.

She slips her hand into the pile while continuing to fix that gaze on you. Out comes her hand and at the other end is that Reynolds pen. Total time taken - 1.35879438 seconds.

Now it is at this moment that you don't quite consider yourself the Alpha male (you always thought yourself to be). Not sure you consider yourself a male at all. If degree of humiliation could have been measured on a barometer, at this moment the mercury would have evaporated.

You leave the potential scene of crime without uttering another word. You want to look beyond the disgrace and start doing a root cause analysis. Maybe it was the 16th compartment where you felt something sharp - you should have investigated further. You probably did less than perfect job with the 21st chamber. Maybe you should have emptied the belongings on to the table and gone through the 30,897 items one by one. Who knows there might have been another way? May be someday Google search will come to the rescue of us men.

If you have any further ideas, do let me know. Who knows one small perfect search and a giant leap for 'men-kind’?