Holmes, the art of deduction and my chaffed nails

If you are a Sherlock Holmes aficionado you would immediately recognize the logic that a man (or woman’s) lifestyle can be ‘deduced’ from her appearance, clothes, style and or speech. 

The classic example is his observation "Do you not find, that with your short sight it is a little trying to do so much typewriting?" to Miss Sutherland in ‘A case of Identity’.  Holmes later explains to Watson that he observed the double lines on her sleeve, where the typist hands press against the table.  That he could clearly see the dint of the pince-nez on either side of her nose.  He further goes on to recount his observations that her right forefinger showing through the torn gloves was dabbed in ink and her boots were half buttoned and mismatched leading him to deduct haste.

Holmes stories do make very interesting reading, even today, when

• the pince-nez has been replaced by contact lens,
• (One of) the last typewriter manufacturing factory in the world (located where else, but in India), has closed down,
• the glove is likely to be torn or worn out at the thumbs with constant texting,
• the identifying marks would be made by the printer (or copier) rather than by the typeface of a typewriter, and
• the description of Mr. Windibank and his travels would be revealed by Facebook, Twitter or Google Latitude instead of his employer.

:-)

So in these not so dissimilar times, (keeping in mind that ‘A Case of Identity’ was written in 1891), I was puzzled with my chaffed fingernails over the course of a week.  Here you can see the odd pattern on the nails clearly on the middle, ring and index fingers of my right hand - somewhat similar was the left.

 
My first thought was ‘Was I blogging so much?’, which isn’t so preposterous considering the amount of time spent over the last month on the keyboard.
:-P

Some 5 days, a nail clipping and keeping off blogosphere revealed the truth.  Remember the cockatiels?  Now that they’ve trebled in numbers, the amount of washing and cleaning their feed and water dishes have doubled if not trebled.  Since these dishes are of clay, the increased washing and scrubbing has been filing away my nails in such odd pattern.  So much for high speed blogging and typing.

Perhaps Mr. Holmes would have deduced it in 5 minutes but being the dummkopf that I am, it took me 5 days.
<:-D

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