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What is Yours Is Yours, What Isn't Is Dangerous
by Jeffrey Payne

Now I have a story for you all, it’s a truly inspirational story, with a lesson and everything. This weekend I was lucky enough to be treated to lunch by my loving sister and her husband. We went to Margheritas in Keene, a personal favorite of mine and a restaurant that happens to carry my favorite hot sauce at every table. After we finished our meal, I knew what had to be done. Why buy the hot sauce at a store, when there’s a bottle right there, unopened and ready to be spread over some fried eggs over easy? So being the smooth operator that I am I convinced the waitress to let me take the bottle of hot sauce as a souvenir of my visit. However, just in case management saw me and got a little fussy, I put the bottle of hot sauce in my shorts pocket as we exited. Now this sounds like a rather poorly thought out plan, but hear me out. It’s worked for two years, why should this time be different?

So, we’re coming home and we’re singing songs and I’m regaling them with stories of my fast paced college life, a real Brady Bunch moment, when the unthinkable happens. We pull up to my tower, I reach for my keys, and there I am, standing outside of G Tower with my hand in a pocket full of hot sauce. I don’t take this especially well and pull my phone and keys and all of the hot sauce bottle shards out of my pocket and send sauce flying all over the place, making the no parking zone outside of G Tower look like a very convincing crime scene. I run up to my room, dripping hot sauce all over the place and getting it on every door handle in the tower, determined to save my phone and get into a new pair of shorts. It wasn’t a total loss though; those shorts never did seem to fit right.

So after a severe personal cleaning session and wiping off all of the door handles so it didn’t look like someone had committed murder and ran through G Tower I feel that this problem has passed, minus the new fragrance my phone now carries. I receive a call from my mother. I put her on speaker because I have no interest in having my phone anywhere near my nose at the moment, when she decides to tell me that my sister had called her and that God had punished me for taking the hot sauce. God had punished me, thanks a heap Mom. So with that comforting piece of knowledge and without a shred of dignity, my day moved forward. Take heed my friends, this could happen to you. You probably won’t encounter the same hot sauce in pants situation, but you get the gist. Don’t take what isn’t yours, something crappy will happen and your mother will tell you that God smote you.