The Great Handbag Exchange

Sometimes it’s not easy being a woman on this ball of hardship that we call Planet Earth. Women face a multitude of challenges every day. From holding down a career to operating a washing machine, women have fought and prevailed. We are damned near as invincible as the old song says.

But there is one thing that defeats us women every time: changing purses.

You would think that changing purses would be a simple thing. All you have to do is take things from one purse and put them in another one, right? Wrong. That’s where the Universe steps in and gets you. It usually does this by making you forget something important. And the Universe has a good laugh when you don’t realize this until you have a life or death need for the thing:

“Uh … Officer, I don’t seem to have my driver’s license with me. I must have left it in my other purse.”

“Oh shit! I’m bleeding all over and no Tampax!”

“Ack! Where are the tickets? … Oh no! I didn’t!”

After this happens to you over and over, you finally get fed up and develop a system. The next time you change purses, you examine each item and make sure that you transfer everything you might have a remote need of sometime into its new home. You go through every single pocket, corner and lining of the original purse to make sure you don’t miss anything.

The Universe won’t let you get away with that. It responds by making you THINK you forgot something. I know, because this happened to me a few days ago.

Messenger Bag -- Huge and Clever
Messenger Bag — Huge and Clever
I have a wonderful canvas messenger bag that’s big enough to carry a full-sized laptop computer. It is also good for sneaking my own snacks into the movies when I don’t want to pay concession stand prices, and it can double as a shopping bag in an emergency. Because I like to carry half my worldly possessions wherever I go, I like big purses, so I was using this one.

The only problem is that the bag only has a couple of small pockets and one big one. It is impossible to keep that big pocket organized. To make things worse, I almost never empty anything out of that bag, including plastic bags, theater programs, flyers, potato chip bags, and whatnot. I always have to dig in it like an archaeologist to find anything.

Cute Black Purse from Target
Cute Black Purse from Target
I got tired of that after a while, and decided to use my cute black purse from Target instead. The cute black purse from Target is a lot smaller than the messenger bag, so I made use of my system. Every single necessary item went into the cute black purse. I stuffed the useless detritus that had accumulated in the messenger bag right back into it. I’ll sort it out. I promise. Really. Well, I’ll have to do something with it when I want to use the bag again, right?

So, the next morning I took the newly packed cute black bag, slung the long strap over myself, cross-body style, and reached in to get my apartment keys.

I couldn’t find them. I searched around every damned pocket in the cute little black purse. No keys. I went through all the pockets again. Nada. Nothing. Niente.

I couldn’t figure out where I could have left those keys, so I looked around the apartment for them. I even reached into my laundry hamper and fished out the skirt I had been wearing the day before. If you have ever reached into a pile of dirty clothes, you know how disgusting that is. I had to wash my hands again, to get any filthy germs off them. They were my own filthy germs and they had already been on me, but I didn’t think of that.

The skirt has two pockets. The keys were not in either one of them. I was not about to investigate the pile of dirty laundry any further to see if the keys had fallen out of the skirt.

I finally decided that the only course of action was to take my spare set of keys (the one that does not include my mailbox key) out of their drawer near the door and use them.

My cat heard the drawer open and came trotting over, hoping to dart out under my feet to the building lobby. I had to divert her by pouring a handful of Temptation treats into her food dish. While she occupied herself with gobbling, I made a dash out the door, closed it and locked it. I put the spare set of keys in the outside pocket of the cute black purse.

On the way home after work, I reached into that outside pocket for the spare set of keys. My fingers felt something familiar. The keys! All of them! They were in the place I thought I had put them in the first place. How I had missed them when I was scouring that same pocket in the morning I don’t know.

Or was it the Universe, taking revenge on me?

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10 thoughts on “The Great Handbag Exchange”

    1. I bought that bag online from Cafe Press. Cafe Press also allows you to design your own items, with your own witty remarks and/or pictures.

      I couldn’t resist this one, but when it comes to handbags and hats I don’t have much resistance, anyway. Some women are crazy about shoes. I’m crazy about handbags and hats. There must be a support group for people like us: Accessories Anonymous!

    1. LOL! The bleeding comment is best spoken in the ladies’ room, to oneself, of course — unless the classless chick planned to use the PMS defense for forgetting her driver’s license and now realizes it is too late for that. 😉

  1. The cat was very quiet while you searched for the keys and then all of a sudden you found the keys where you had already looked for them. Get a lamp over the cats head and ask some questions! The Y wallet has a credit card in it. As long as I can pay for shoes to apologise for being me, I’ll be doing good!

  2. What if we changed the paradigm? Always have everything you need all the time, and put the things you don’t need in the purse.

    I guess that is why I have ridiculously full, and very unsightly pockets.

  3. Oh, you are ON to something. It’s not easy transferring “stuff” – there’s stuff for a small bag, and extra stuff for a big bag, and then you have to decide what is essential, and somehow, keys don’t make the cut. I loved this!

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