I didn’t intend to bring a weapon into the courthouse.

No, seriously guys.

I know that it probably sounds like a full-of-crap statement. But it’s totally not.

See, I have this key on my key ring that’s not really a key.

It’s a knife.

I don’t know why someone would disguise a key as a knife, and yes, I acknowledge that most knives disguised as things that are not knives are generally intended to be used for nefarious purposes.

Hence the inocuous camouflage.

But I truly believe that this knife, which is disguised as a key, was really just meant to be cute. Or utilitarian. Or congruent, really. Because some people have OCD that’s significant enough to make them not okay with a knife on their key ring that looks like anything other than a key.

I don’t know.

I do strongly suspect that no one intended for this knife to be used for anything other than small conveniences.

I’ve used it a total of twice. Once to cut a zip tie that was inexcusably applied to a magazine which was rolled up in my mailbox. The other time I used it to open a stubborn box from Amazon which refused to yield to my fingernail which, at the time was filed pointy enough to be considered a weapon itself.

Honestly, I don’t know how long I’ve had it but it’s been long enough that I forgot that I had it altogether.

I’ve been into the courthouse, through the new single point of entry, a dozen times or more. No one ever noticed my key knife, and being that I’d forgotten I had it, that means that I’ve been into the courthouse at least half a dozen times with a technical weapon in my pocket.

But not on December 14. At around poon. Because it was on that day that Chief Deputy Chuck Fetzek, who was inspecting my personal effects as I was being swabbed by the handheld metal detector, discovered the offending item and was forced to spend over one full minute trying to extricate it from my portly collection of real  keys.

I’m most sorry that Deputy Fetzek was required to interact with the confounding Rubik’s cube that is my key ring.

But I do commend him for finding it.

Because it had been a long time since I’d even thought about it. For all intents and purposes, in my head, it didn’t even exist.

I forgot to reclaim my handy dandy key knife when I left the courthouse that afternoon.

But this morning, as I was leaving, Deputy Peterson asked me whether I’d gotten my knife back.

To be honest I’d forgotten all about it again.

But when I got it back, it had actually been placed in the evidence room. And it was returned to me in a real, authentic evidence bag.

Honestly, I was more excited to have something sealed in a real live evidence bag than I was to have my knife back.

So that’s exactly how I left it.

Hung it, actually. Beside my desk. Next to a bag of weird things that Kiley left me when she abandoned me in the newsroom with a bunch of boys and gave me permission to take ownership of her desk.

Sometimes, what happens isn’t what we intend to have happen. Sometimes, what happens is despite our intentions. Sometimes, we don’t intend anything at all.

But sometimes, regardless of our intentions, what happens – or what we get back – is better than what we turned in.

To the evidence room.

Even knives.