Remembrances

I finally saw a vanity plate that wasn't moving along the thruway at 65 mph.  This one was in a parking lot, but do you think there were any others among the gazillion cars parked there?  Oh no!  What's with the drivers in NY???

The other day I posted a story about my golf experience while in college. It occured to me that since I'm using this blog as a sort of journal, and will be making a book out of it at the end of the year, I should try and post a few more remembrances "for the record".  Someday, maybe, just maybe, my children/grandchildren will pick up one of the "blog books" and browse through it.  They might learn something about me that they didn't already know.

Not that my life was particularly interesting or noteworthy, but there have been a few funky instances that I don't usually talk about, primarily because I don't usually think about them on a daily basis. 

So when I was trying to remember some of those situations, this was one of the first things that came to my mind.

Within months of beginning college, one of the soda machines began acting weird, as in, we could hear the bottle of soda begin to drop down inside the machine, but it never reached the opening where we could get it.  So the machine kept eating our money.  One day I decided to explore the situation and see what was preventing the bottle from reaching its destination.

That involved putting my hand inside the machine, reaching up to where the bottles were and trying to guide the bottle through its route to see why it was getting stuck.  Well, I found the bottles and was able to keep my hand on it as it began its descent.  Until . . . my thumb became wedged between something below my hand and the entire stack of bottles above my hand. 

So there I was, with my hand stuck and my arm inside the dumb soda machine all the way up to my elbow.  Hmmmm . . . what to do now, I wondered.  Finally someone came along and saw my predicament and went to find the dorm mother.  In the meantime, my finger was getting flatter and flatter by the minute because of all the weight on it.  Dorm mother = nowhere to be found.  Dorm mother = the only one with the key to the soda machine. (Now remember, this was back in the day when there was no such thing as cell phones & computers) Someone was dispatched to try and locate her downtown. 

By this time there were about a dozen other students gathered around the machine watching the progress (or non-progress in this case) of the frosh-with-her-hand-stuck-in-the-soda-machine-chuckle-chuckle.  Meanwhile, my thumb was beginning to seriously throb.  My boyfriend was outside the door pacing and worried sick.

By the time the dorm mother arrived, I was more than ready to get out of there.  (ok, ok,  I hear you laughing again.  STOP IT ! ! ! )  When she walked in, the first thing she said was, "I was wondering when something like this was going to happen".  When I heard that, it occured to me that I had done her a favor.  I had fulfilled her expectations and she didn't ever have to worry about that again.  Sure enough, it never happened again, at least not during the 4 years I was there.

So, she opened the machine, released my poor thumb and warned me never to do that again.  Seriously ? ?  Did I really need to be warned?,  but you know how "mothers" are.  My thumb recovered nicely, and I even  managed to laugh about it.  But ever since then, if a soda machine ate my money, I walked away, wishing it well.