When I was a kid Cracker Jack used to come with really cool prizes. One of them was the justly feared Chinese finger trap which I, of course, got myself thoroughly stuck in. I can remember my mother rolling her eyes as she had to walk me through easing my way to freedom. I hadn't thought about that toy in, uh, probably decades.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I ran a batch of sheets through the laundry. When I took them out of the dryer I emptied the lint trap. With the lint trap out of its slot, I noticed that some really fine linty dust had managed to escape the trap and had coagulated down in the dryer.

Normally I would go get my hand vac and suck that stuff out, but my hand vac was upstairs where it had cleaned up a minor cracker crumb disaster. Going upstairs seemed a real hassle. In a flash of blinding stupidity laziness, uh, creativity, I decided to just stick my hand down in the slot and retrieve the clot of lint.

My hand went down into the slot perfectly fine but when it came time to pull my hand back up, that little pad of flesh on my palm bunched up and I suddenly found myself a prisoner of the dryer. Even worse, there was a kind of sharp edge to the slot that the lint trap went in, and that sharp edge started sawing the tender skin on my wrist every time I moved my hand.

This only made me panic and try pulling up even harder, which made even more scrapes on my wrist. Yes, yes I am the one person you want to be in an emergency with. I can pretty much guarantee that I will do the absolutely wrong thing, so all you'd need to do in an emergency is watch what I'm doing and do the exact opposite thing.

Had I been left on my own for very long I probably would have ended up sawing my hand off with the raw edge on the lint trap hole because, somehow, it would have seemed the only way out. Fortunately, I have a spousal unit. Fortunately he came into the house to look for something.

He contemplated me firmly ensconced in my Chinese hand trap. I sheepishly explained my lint gathering folly. He looked the situation over, gently pulled the metal of the lint trap opening forward a bit with one of his hands, and my hand popped out quite easily. Which, of course, I could have done for myself with my free hand if I had just thought about the situation for a few seconds.

.:cough:.

If the spousal unit had done such a bone-headed creative thing, I would have indulged in, at the very least, mass quantities of smirking. However, not only is the spousal unit a much smarter person than I am, he is also a much better person than I am.

He just had me put some peroxide on the scrapes on my wrist and then totally let the subject drop. Which means, I guess, that if by some bizarre twist in the space time continuum he should actually do something equally, uh, creative, I'm also going to have to treat him with respect and consideration.

You can well imagine my bitterness, eh?

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 64.53 miles