Be afraid - the door to obsession lurks in the most innocent of frames.

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What could be so terrible, you ask?

Many moons ago, I posted an extremely odd history of the safety pin, as I was being driven mad by what I thought was a weird safety pin design. It turned into a surprisingly long, and if the comments I got mean anything, actually interesting post (think Alice in Wonderland - it became a fascinating rabbit hole), and what was even more surprising was that a lot (and I do mean a lot) of people read it and made interesting comments about it.

Last year's safety pin enigma, the key to

Yup, it happened again

I promise you, this will not be a 1000 word treatise on the history of the safety pin. However, it might touch on the little things that catch our attention and how we allow them to consume us sometimes. Yes, that is foreshadowing.

I was minding my own business, walking out of the office which is kindly hosting our startup in Lusaka...when my eye was drawn to an innocent-looking shape lying, no, lurking (as it turned out) on the pavement.

Now I'm 171cm tall (which in Imperial units is about an inch shorter than I was ten years ago), so that was really tiny to catch my eye. But catch my eye on Monday morning it did, as we walked into the office, blissfully unaware of the wormhole which was about to open up.

I managed to walk past it going out to meetings and lunch, going back to the hotel and going in and out for the day. I'm all grown up, and can totally resist temptation.

Until Wednesday, coming back from lunch.

I took the bait.

I crouched down to see if it really was a paper clip. And yes, since it's an office building and it was lunchtime, so there were lots of people going in and out of the office. Nobody asked the crazy lady what she was doing, because nobody ever asks crazy ladies what they're doing, in case they tell you.

Here's a closer view.

What an artifact, you all cry! Isn't that beautiful? What symmetry. What colour. What design elegance. What a...what a...paper clip?

What?!? It's a whatsits lying on the ground outside of an office, fer goodness sake.

Get a grip, @kiligirl, says I to myself. You don't really have to know if it's a paper clip. You can resist this.

But I did have to know. Because if that was a paper clip, someone with skill had gone to a lot of effort to make it perfectly symmetrical, not to mention airplane-shaped. And then I would have wondered who could have wrought such a wondrous achievement, since this is how rabbit holes turn into wormholes. (Luckily there was absolutely no way to figure out who the clipperpetrator might have been.) In any case, the only way to find out was to get up close and personal with it.

The disappointment of the intrepid archeologist

That nose-to-nose experience with the alien airplane was all I needed to conclude - with great sadness - that although the material was most paper clip-like, and of a fetching red colour it was too...there was simply too much wire in there to be a conventional paper clip.

So, disappointed as I was, and with a history of researching safety pins and now nearly paper clips for no good reason, you'd think I would have checked on the Great Google whether there was such a thing as a Paper Clip With More Wire.

You'll be relieved to learn...

...I didn't.

THE END

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