Why You Shouldn't Try to Go Down Laundry Chutes: A Personal Experience

Dear all,

It appears that I am somehow expected to come up with brilliant and witty posts in the very near future, I hate to break it to everyone, but it is difficult for me to do anything that fits that criteria, much less anything that people as brilliant and witty as yourselves would find brilliant and witty...this leaves me in a hard spot. However, I would like to bring it to everyone's attention that I have just lost my $20 BPA-free BYU water bottle. I just discovered it this very minute. I was pondering what deep insights I might be able to bring to your attention, decided that I might be able to think better with a drink, reached down to my backpack and discovered that I left my water bottle in my last class. I'm not happy. Not happy.

With that little announcement out of the way I will continue. This morning as I was getting ready to come to school I was struggling to remember how to work the shower (someday soon I will have to blog about our shower and its ability to leave me feeling like a bamboozled maze rat every day of my life, it's a bad feeling, being bamboozled by your shower) and I thought back to all my other stupid moments and decided that I might as well share one, since I can’t think of anything really deep.

First off, I have to say that I blame it all on the "Carl" books. For those of you not fortunate enough to be acquainted with these books, they are books for very small children, all pictures and no words. The books are about a large black dog named Carl and a little kid. I was about 8 or 9 when we got a new Carl book that was about the dog babysitting the little kid. The book went through and showed all the fun and crazy things that the dog helped the little kid do; however, I was struck by one activity in particular. The dog let the baby slide down the laundry chute, which was constructed like a slide. I noted the overjoyed expression on the baby's face and thought with great delight of our laundry chute. I determined that I would slide down our laundry chute.

I hied my way to the bathroom and opened the cupboard that the laundry chute was inside, anticipating a fast, fun ride. I should mention that my younger sister was there watching me, she plays an important role later in the story. Sadly, due to some lack of cognitive development I did not think to observe the differences between our laundry chute and the one in the book. The chute in the book was a nice little wooden slide, our laundry chute was a hole cut in the floor that opened onto a shelf some five feet below in our basement laundry room. Well, I managed to get into the laundry chute till just my upper body was still above the floor. Then, to my horror, I discovered that I was stuck. My legs were dangling below the floor, and my upper-body was stuck above it. I tried to pull myself back out but my arms were too short to get much leverage, my darling little sister went down stairs and tried pulling my legs to get me the rest of the way down but that didn't work either and I just got more stuck. So there I was. I began to think I was never going to get out—I was going to be stuck in the laundry chute forever—so I began to cry and call for my Mom.

 I still don't know how my Mom managed to not die laughing when she found me stuck in the laundry chute, but I don't remember a single chuckle escaping her. She pulled me out of the laundry chute, set me on my feet, and asked me what I was doing. Between sniffs I told her the obvious, "I was trying to go down the laundry chute and got stuck."

That has to be one of the more defining moments of my life, and there has to be something deep you can learn from it besides “you shouldn’t go down laundry chutes,” but I will let all of you decide what it is. Happy blogging!