This just in from the Department of Tangentially Minded Over-Shares:

Years ago—probably in the late 1990s—I bought my first nose hair trimmer. It was a relatively cheap device, operated by a single AA battery. I used it a few times over the following months and it did its job, whacking unwanted nostril hair.

However, about six months or so after I bought it, I inserted the business end of that bad boy into a nostril, hit the on switch, and nearly passed out from the ensuing pain. It turned out that the battery had reached the end of its little life a millisecond or two after I fired it up, and with its dying gasps of power, the little blades turned just fast enough to rip, not shear, my nostril forestation. After yanking out a few dozen hairs—and let me tell you that nose hairs don’t like to be pulled, not one bit—the battery died mid-way through the job, trapping dozens of more hairs in the end of the trimmer.

I am not kidding when I tell you that I let go of the trimmer and it just hung there, swinging from the nose hairs upon which it held in a death grip. In order to extricate the trimmer, I had to pull straight down, ripping many more of them out at the root. Now, I never have been one to cry, but the pain from having dozens of nose hairs yanked out at once is, well, exquisite.

After getting up from the floor (where I had been curled in a fetal position) I threw the entire trimmer—with countless nose hairs still trapped in the blades of death—right into the trash. I’ve since had several other trimmers, but I ALWAYS test them OUTSIDE my nostril to make sure that the little blades inside are whirring away happily before I even think about sticking it into my nose.

And there you have it—the story of how an innocent looking nose hair trimmer resulted in me finding religion.