Little Things... (Electric Toothbrushes)

I had a moment of frustration the other morning that I’m hoping you can empathise with. I was happily cleaning my teeth with my electric toothbrush, pondering some of life’s little mysteries while the stiff bristles steadily whittled away at my tooth enamel. Why are unicorns always horses and not dogs or ducks? What power does my hair possess to be able to defy gravity quite so successfully every morning? What is the average life expectancy of a wotsit at a child’s birthday party? And other questions of equally earth-shattering importance. When I suddenly realised that I may very well have missed a transition. A wave of dread and panic washed over me. Was that the second buzz or the third? Help, quick! What do I do? Do I give the upper left quadrant a cursory whizz before switching to the upper right? Or do I stick longer with the left and risk leaving a full quarter of my teeth unbrushed? Think man, think! I went with my gut and stuck with the left, only for the dratted thing to hum to a satisfied halt at the tip of my front left incisor. ‘Noooooo!’ I yelled in a slightly more dramatic fashion than Hayden Christensen when it suddenly dawned on him that he’d finally become Darth Vader and would be forced to wear a silly shiny-black duck-faced mask for the rest of his acting career.

So, there I was, frothy foam dribbling down my chin, wondering quite what to do with myself. It appeared to me that I had three possible solutions:

1) Carry on in ‘manual’, frantically humming like a mad-man, hoping against hope that I’d trick my teeth into believing they’d had a proper clean.

2) Whip out my trusty back up ‘normal’ toothbrush to finish the job.

3) Stop right there and stumble around the rest of the day knowing that I’d condemned a quarter of my teeth to a slightly earlier grave that the other twenty-four.

Life is full of tough choices and, whilst not quite the Rubicon (that’s the river, not the drink), this was definitely my toughie of the morning.

So, which way did I turn?

I don’t think anyone who really knows me would be surprised to hear that I went with option 1.