The Most Beautiful Nails

It was the summer of 2000, I was working in a laboratory testing water (see Chicken Water). Everyday there would be different people arriving with water samples to be tested. Usually, the delivery was dropped off by a man, probably because in some regards collecting the water was a dirty job that most women were not interested in.

Typically the mornings at my job were filled with reading out the previous days results only to be followed by a bit of downtime as we waited for additional samples to come in throughout the day before starting the new tests in the afternoon. During that time we would often chat about different things going on during the day or events that we were coming up with, etc. When customers would come in, they would ring a doorbell, and then one of the employees would greet them at the door and accept the sample that they had brought. The rest of us might look to see who it was, but often remained in the back of the lab.

Naturally, it came as a bit of a shock when my co-workers told me about a particular customer that would come in with the most beautifully painted fingernails. On and on they would rave about just how perfectly they were painted, usually with a intricate work being done on the long nails. However, this customer only came in once a quarter at best, so for quite some time I only heard about the nails. I was a bit surprised that a woman with such beautiful nails delivered the samples from an oil refinery that was fifty miles to the north. I had to admit, this came as a bit of a shock, who would think that a lady that would take so much time to work on her nails would be employed at an oil refinery?

On one particular morning, myself and the other employees were chatting in the back when the doorbell rang. Who was it? Sure enough, it was a delivery from the oil refinery. I was told in a whisper that I should be the one to go and collect the sample. So, I walked to the front of the lab to greet the customer. Naturally, my first glance was to the nails, which were indeed impressive. They were painted cherry red with a slight starburst of white in the top of each nail. It was hard to imagine how much time was spent to create such fine and intricate lines.

Slowly my eyes left her nails to reach the hands, which, to my surprise were not young hands, but rather belonged to someone that must have been in their 60s. I'm not exactly sure why, but as she put the sample down on the counter, I found myself focused more on her hands as she was signing the chain of custody than on anything else.

After she finished signing the paper she slid over to me, where I read her signature, Stephen Michaels. Stephen? My eyes slowly lifted up to find the woman dressed in a pair of old overalls and a t-shirt. I found this even more odd, first, that her name was Stephen and second that a woman of her age would be wearing overalls. Her hair ended right above her shoulders in somewhat of a long page-boy type hair cut, that was clearly a poorly managed wig. Just as my eyes reached her face, the obviousness of the situation hit me. Sure enough, the woman from the oil refinery turned out to be just another man, bringing in a sample from his dirty job.