making of

feeling underdressed

Today’s picture shows you yesterday’s result of my aspiration to do one sketch a day: Me sitting and waiting for a meeting in the evening. The location: Hyatt bar. A nice place with interesting guests, where I always feel a bit underdressed  and out of place.

Today’s topic: Not related, really… cache pompes. The things that are around the collar of your perfume bottles, some perfume bottles. Some bottles do not hide the crimping around the spray, but most do hide the crimping using a cache pompe, which is French for “hides the pump”. As Annsmith mentioned in her comment yesterday: I use o-rings for that. They also make the bakelite top stick and seal the pump. Last year, I was considering to change this. The price for a simple cache pompe is comparable and in a sense, a nice silver cache pompe looks a bit  more elegant; using the Hyatt analogy: I felt that my flacon is a bit underdressed when it comes to the cache pompe.

So I did a test with some. Ordered more. And tested again. And again. And realized that -you would not expect this- the crimping around the pump might get loosened by fixing this new cache pompe. So I wanted to play it safe and decided not to.

Later this year, when talking to business friends, I heard stories that were indeed nightmares. Brands switching cache pomps and without realizing the whole thing started to leak. They tested first, of course, and nothing leaked, but when shipped by air, suddenly, the bottles leaked; because the cache pompe loosened the crimping. Quel horreur! What a nightmare. Imagine: You are the producer and realize that hundreds of bottles out there might leak, at least some of them.

This, this can kill you, fast and efficiently.

Thus, sometimes, feeling underdressed is not wrong, but rather: You are perfectly dressed for your journey that ends up being rougher than what you thought.

Thus, my rule when riding a car: Always dress in a way that allows you to walk outside for a mile or two, or stand outside next to your car for an hour or two.