My wife and I moved into a new townhouse recently. One of the first home improvement projects on the list was to get rid of the crappy, rusting old storm door and replace it with a shiny new one. Anyone who has attempted this project before knows it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, but with some help from my father-in-law we we’re able to knock the job out in about two hours.
Ok, mission accomplished, time to go inside and relax with a brew.
Now, the beer in question had been started while we were putting the finishing touches on the door. Now I’m relaxing on the couch, watching TV, and I take a good size slug of beer.
<clank!>
Beer, as far as I’ve ever been aware, is not supposed to go “clank”. Especially with an odd “metal on tooth” sound. I go over to the sink, spit the mouthful of beer into my hand, and find one of the screws we were using to hang the door! Somehow, it would seem, this screw managed to finaggle it’s way into my beer can.
“Huh”, thinks I, “that’s rather odd”, but I just count my blessings that I didn’t swallow it and move on with my day. Back onto the couch.
Hmmm…need to get a bit more comfortable. So, off come the shoes, up go the feet onto the coffee table. Ahhh…that’s better…now…ummm…wait…why does it feel like something is…crawling…inside my sock?? Off goes the sock, and <tink> onto the table goes a small washer. I pick it up and confirm that, yes, this is one of the washers we were using to install the door. Hmmm…two extra parts finding their way into foreign spots. How very odd. But, again, I let it pass.
After watching TV for awhile, one naturally need to do a bit of posterior shifting. I do a bit of butt wiggling (it’s a newer couch, so it hasn’t fully developed a good “ass groove”), and feel bit of an itch in the buttock region. I don’t think much of it, until a short time later when I get up to go to the bathroom. As I’m walking, I start to feel a major itch, and it seems to be centered dead smack in the middle of the butt crack. Well, since I’m heading to the bathroom anyway, where I’ll be well-equipped to wash my hands, I decide this itch will wait no longer. I reach into the back of my pants, into the underwear, and come across the source of my discomfort.
Somehow, a good-sized chunk of the rough plastic bag that contained screws for the door was wedged up my butt.
Ok, a screw in my beer can is one thing. The can does not contain any nerves which should alert my brain of the presence of a screw. The washer in the sock? Easy to miss, especially when wearing shoes (although I can’t figure how a washer crawled up my pants leg and wiggled its way into a relatively tight sock). But rough, crinkly plastic? In my ass?? I simply cannot grasp how that can go unnoticed.
And I certainly can’t fathom how it managed to find its way there. The door came with several of these bags, but once they were opened and emptied, the bag went right into the garbage. I was wearing a shirt that hung at least three inches below the beltline of my pants. And I was wearing tight underwear. So somehow this piece of plastic blew out of the garbage and landed on the ground near where we were working. Then, apparently, as I was lying on the ground drilling holes for the lower screws, my shirt lifted perfectly while my pants were doing the plumber’s crack thing. Then another gust of wind lifted the plastic and safely deposited it in it’s new home. I can’t see that actually happening, but it seems to fall perfectly into the whole Sherlockian “improbable/impossible” theory. And my FIL is not the type to play practical jokes (or, in the case of the beer can, try to kill me), so I know he didn’t have any involvement.
From now on, I gotta take more careful inventory of parts when I do projects like this.
