Last Thursday evening, 31-year-old Melanie Andrews casually glanced down at her hand while riding the subway only to suddenly realize that she had been wearing a purple satin scrunchie on her wrist every day straight since junior high school.
“Oh my good lord no!” she reportedly wailed as she discovered the scrunchie she had been looking for since it went missing in 2001. After quickly checking her other wrist for a Livestrong bracelet, she realized she needed to examine the last sixteen years of her life.
Andrews had purchased the purple scrunchie in 1998 during a buy-one-get-two-free sale at Claire’s. It caught her eye due to its unique combination of softness, purpleness, and sparkliness. She had also worn it on her wrist a lot, just in case she had to put her hair into a quick ponytail to do a gym class step workout or dissect a worm in science class.
And somehow in the intervening 18 years, she’d forgotten to remove the now unfashionable scrunchie. Amazing!
“This explains why I bombed my big interview last month, and a lot of other things I’ve lost along the way,” Andrews says. “Plus, this probably explains why I haven’t gotten laid since 2001.”
After finding the scrunchie, Andrews ran to her photo album and flipped through the pages, shocked to find that she had indeed had the scrunchie on the entire time: her college graduation, her hike of the Appalachian trail, and her sister’s wedding.
Distraught, Andrews then covered her face with her hands, and then began to pull at her hair–only to discover that she had had a butterfly clip in there since the premiere of Friends.
When asked how she will proceed after this discovery, Andrews responded: “Maybe,” she says, “Maybe if I just hold out a little longer, they will come back into style?”
