People do dumb things. This is a fact of life. I've had more than my share of "airhead moments" -- I've already confessed to riding a bicycle with
no air in the tires and sticking my head in a ceiling fan. And, I'm afraid, these are not isolated incidents. But I've taken heart. I'm not alone. I'm surrounded by friends, family and readers who are equally gifted at being column
fodder. One friend told me the following story in response to my ceiling fan column: He was painting his child's room and climbed up the ladder with a gallon of paint in his hands. Only he forgot about the ceiling fan. Of
course, the ceiling fan didn't forget about him. The ensuing adventure was much more colorful than my getting bopped in the head and a whole lot messier, too. I'm not certain but I think the carpet had to be replaced.
Then,
of course, there was the friend who confessed to me that she's afraid she's slipping in her old age. Upon reading The Daily News headline "NATO Bombs Belgrade" she was momentarily horrorstruck until she realized it was Belgrade,
Yugoslavia, not the Belgrade community of Onslow County, North Carolina, although one editor reminded me that stranger things have happened around here -- Navy SEALS once invaded Sneads Ferry, a sleepy little fishing village on the
coast.
Another responded to my column about being pregnant and belligerent to recount how she stumbled sleepily into the bathroom one night, late in her pregnancy and quite cumbersome, only to discover her husband had left
the toilet seat up. Unfortunately for her, the discovery was made when she found herself stuck in the commode and unable to get up.
Then there's the guy who offered to gas up his wife's brand new car while they were on a
road trip. So he filled it up, only to discover he'd pumped it full of diesel fuel (it wasn't a diesel, by the way). They spent the next three hours cooling their jets while the diesel fuel was pumped from the tank.
And
there was the friend who had to give a training session at her office. Tired and not in the mood to deal with it, she set her VCR to tape an educational show about the subject she was supposed to cover and went to bed. The next
morning, she plugged the tape in the VCR at work and told the trainees she'd be back in an hour to see what they learned. When she returned, she found a mystified class of adults trying to figure out why they'd just watched "Yogi
Bear" and "The Huckleberry Hound Show".
And, of course, there's the young executive who was so excited about a conference she was attending that she forgot to take the hair rollers out of the back of her head and spent the
first couple of hours mesmerizing people with her row of pink sponge plastic hair curlers, surrounded by a cloud of otherwise perfectly-coifed tresses.
Isn't it nice to know the world is full of people just like me?
