WARNING: Hypothetical Situation

Hypothetically speaking, let's say you have a girlfriend who tends to run or bike or walk from her car in the dark wee hours of the morning and evening. And suppose we say that you live in a city where there are sometimes random bouts of violent crime. Muggings, rape and the sort. And how about, all things being hypothetical, that you are concerned about the safety of your aforementioned girlfriend and so decide to buy her a little thingamajig of pepper spray for her to carry around in case of attack. And why don't we assume, for at least this instance, that one day the girlfriend mistakenly drops the pepper spray and a small piece of the thingamajig falls off.

Let's take this one step further and make believe that the girlfriend, knowing she had to go for a 6am run the next morning, comes to you the night before to ask if the pepper spray will still work. And perhaps, hypothetically of course, you reassemble the thingamajig, look at it from all angles, and tell your girlfriend that it will still work.

Suppose that in this particular scenario, the girlfriend asks you whether you think it will be alright if she went outside to give the pepper spray a quick test, just to make sure it works.

This is the crucial turning point. If this happens to you, I beg of you to not say "yes." I repeat, DO NOT let the girlfriend go out and test the pepper spray.

Because, if you did say yes, we can only suppose that the girlfriend may walk out to a small remote part of the patio and give the pepper spray thingamajig a little tug, all the while pointing it towards an empty part the fence. As we can guess, the spray will spritz properly and the girlfriend will probably rush back inside, safe and proud.

But what you may not have realized in this hypothetical situation, is that despite the fact the spraying was done outside, downwind and far from the door, the girlfriend's rapid movements may have whoooshed some of the spray inside. And maybe when she walks in the door she will suddenly start coughing. Maybe that mysterious coughing may even hypothetically lead to some pretty crazy nose burning. As a matter of fact, her hypothetical sinuses may even start to act up.

As if that's not enough, perhaps at the same time as she's coughing, spitting and snorting, and you're sitting idly on the couch just beginning to worry, maybe you too will start coughing and maybe your sinuses will start burning and maybe suddenly you will also feel like hacking up a lung as you try to blow the fire out of your nose.

Probably at this time you may even put the pepper spray thingamajig outside and close the patio door in hopes of doing anything to clean the air. But you'd probably soon realize that nothing you can do will stop the burning because this hypothetical pepper spray has somehow infiltrated the air around you, not to mention polluted the blood coursing through your veins.

So maybe you two quickly leave the living room area and hide far away in the bedroom. Perhaps when you are both laying in bed, blowing your noses, coughing up phlegm and guzzling water that you'll start to get really concerned for your girlfriend's cat. You may even hope that he doesn't stay out in the living room and that he sleeps in the bed that night with the two of you, even though you're allergic to cats.

At this time you may possibly even find yourself praying that you don't wake up in the morning to a violently ill kitty because somewhere along the way you have developed a sort of funny loving affection for the cute little button even though you're definitely not a cat person, no matter what anybody says.

Of course there's good news to all of this. If everything happened as I described, you'd all probably wake up just fine the next morning. And that makes for a happy ending.

Hypothetically speaking, of course.