The bored man with the magnetic nose

One day at age 7 I chanced upon my father having a deep conversation with the man in the mirror about whether he should retain the villainstyle moustache he had grown the previous week My father was for the moustache the man in the mirror apparently was notHe made menacing faces at the other guy who remained unmovedThey say it is what you do when you believe no one is watching that reveals the real you Thatrsquos when your inner douchebag slinks out to take a stretchThatrsquos when you feel empowered to sniff your armpits take selfies of yourself and delete them pee in the shower and assert your right to pass gas making no attempt to disguise the origin sound or lethality of the emissionYou donrsquot have to be polite or civilised You are beyond criticism or judgement You are free to break every rule do something ewwww check out your own deejay voice use your cat to clean the carpet or talk to the broomYour forefinger can ferret deep inside your nose digging for buried treasure while you helpfully contort your faceWhich makes me ask what happens when you have no choice but to be alone What if the isolation went on for days and weeks then months What if there was a pandemic and you had to be alone for two yearsWhat crazy things did people do alone in their rooms during the lockdownOne woman spent hours and days trying to make a face mask out of her bra ldquoItrsquos not going wellrdquo she wrote on TwitterAnother fellow shot videos of himself lying on his bed lip syncing Harry Styles songs for three hours while his cat sat on his chestAn Asian talked to himself in unsuccessful American and British accents as he went about his houseBut the weirdest has to be the story of Dr Daniel Reardon 27 a bored astrophysicist studying pulsars and gravitational waves at Swinburne University in lovely Melbourne His wide forehead hints at a hefty neocortex and maybe a gift for outofthebox thinking Isolated in his home by the pandemic lockdown of March 2020 Danrsquos mind was navigating an unfamiliar universe He normally studied ginormous stars but now he was homebound by things only nanometers wideHe began studying Covid19 He soon twigged on that these microscopic entities hopped onto the hands of people who touched things other people had touched such as doorknobs handles and tabletopsOnce there they hitched a ride to the personrsquos nose and mouth when he or she next picked their nose wiped ketchup off their lips or chewed their fingernailsIf only he could invent a wearable device that would make an alarming sound when a personrsquos hand approached their face His neocortex asked if this was possible replied ldquoSimple Reardon Use neodymium magnetsrdquoOf course Neodymium magnets Excited Dr Reardon set about designing a necklace containing a circuit that could detect magnetic fields People would wear a magnetic wristband and whenever their hand approached their face the necklace would buzz continuouslyUnfortunately he got his circuits asswisemdashthe necklace buzzed continuously unless the personrsquos hand was near their face Rather than throwing good money after bad Reardon gave up inventing and began playing with the magnets instead fascinated by how they stuck to each otherIf he placed one on either side of his earlobes they clamped together nicely sandwiching the earlobeDelightfulEach magnet was barely 7 mm across Would they fit inside his nostrils He slipped two inside one nostril and one in the other with the division in between They fit snugly Bingo A septum sandwich Danielrsquos inner child was tickled pinkHow to get them out Being rare earth magnets they were powerful and just pulling them didnrsquot work they were bonded too strongly Realizing this could turn out to be a bit of a problem he tried using pliers but they merely got magnetised themselves and attached to the magnets He prised them off with difficultyHe tried the source of all knowledge Google searching with ldquotips for getting magnets out of noserdquo Luck A 11yearold boy whorsquod done it suggested using a third magnet to pull out the ones lodged insideExcited Daniel deployed his fourth and remaining magnet close to the first nostril with the septum in between For a moment it looked like it might work Then he lost his gripmdashand the fourth magnet too snapped into his nostrilDr Reardon had three magnets inside one nose and one in the other when they took him to the OPD The magnets were eventually removed using advanced nonGoogle technologyTherersquos a lesson in this somewhere It might be donrsquot pick your nose during a pandemicHere viewed from there C Y Gopinath in Bangkok throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai the city that raised him You can reach him at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback tomailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper