A Broken Bottle

As I looked into the distance as I was walking down the beach the other day, I was surprised to see that something very shiny had just washed up in the surf. At first, I thought that it was probably somebody's old trash that they had simply been too lazy to throw away, but my curiosity got the best of me, and so I went to see what it was anyway. As I got closer, I realized that I had just stumbled upon (great website, by the way) what just about everybody that's ever been to a beach has dreamed of finding, a message in a bottle.

As I picked it up to get a closer look, I thought that some grandma somewhere had recently found a great way to bond with her grandkids. However, as I looked closer I didn't see the colored pirate ships and dinosaurs that I was expecting, but instead a younger woman's handwriting. The bottle didn't look to be too old. It was a 2010 Italian Pinot Grigio (I'm not sure what that says about the woman's tastes), and the label on the bottle was not worn barely at all. In fact, it looked like it could have been thrown in the water the day I picked it up, and seeing that I found it about 200 yards from a fishing pier, the owner was probably nervously watching as I picked it up.

As soon as I got back to the house I gathered my family and we cracked open the bottle as carefully as we could. The moment that the contents of the bottle were within reach, hands shot out from everywhere grabbing every last piece of paper that had previously been inside. It turns out that the message was one lady's form of venting. My little sisters quickly figured this out and put the pages back. Within those pages a plethora of people were addressed, in especially not-nice language, stating the ways that they had done her wrong. These peoples' lack of judgment, sheer stupidity, and extreme incompetence were all discussed over and over again. It turns out that the lady had watched as a coworker who had been there three months got promoted over her, who had been there three years, as she looked on in anger and frustration, and that this bottle was the only way that she could truly express what she was feeling (and boy, did she express it!).

She must have been angry. There's over 30 pages here!

I'm not sure what I really learned from this. Probably, that if I put a message in a bottle someday, I'm going to put a fake treasure map inside to get the reader's hopes up.Think about how much cooler of a post this would have been! I'd be writing about my preparations for a nationwide treasure hunt, instead of a random angry person. However, I did learn what this lady's grocery list was, as it was scratched out at the top of one of pages. Looks like watermelon and toilet paper were on the list for this week.