Things We Lost In The Chair

Important discovery last night: nothing irritates a slumbering husband more than being nudged awake at 12:52 am to perform emergency surgery on a large piece of furniture that may have... kind of...accidently...and inadvertantly swallowed the wife's cell phone.

Not that I didn't try to rescue it on my own. For like an hour. Because there is nothing I hate more than committing an obviously careless act and then having to enlist the man of the house to help. And then on top of it, having to endure a mini-lecture at 1:00 in the morning on the proper way to take care of a cell phone. Detailing why men are more responsible with important things. Like keys. And rings. And cell phones. They always have them physically on them or in an exact location on the kitchen counter that never changes. Blah, blah, blah.

Even when a sometimes random, slightly neurotic wife goes on one of her cleaning sprees - keys and cell phone stay where they are. Because "we must have order!" Order, I tell you.

I'm not so good with order. I like to change things up every now and then. Just for fun. Actually, it's because I have this thing with repetition and routine. Case in point - the movie Groundhog Day. It drives me crazy. Especially the beginning of each scene that keeps repeating the day with the alarm clock turning to 6:00 am and Sonny & Cher's "I've Got You Babe" playing...ughhh it's driving me crazy just thinking about it! And there I go digressing, again.

So, back to the cell phone being eaten by the chair. I tried all the basic cell phone rescuing techniques taught by the American Red Cross. Shoving my hand into the dark, scary crevice of the living room chair that is filled with crumbs and hair and dirt and a juice box plastic straw wrapper and goldfish crackers. That lasted about 1/2 a second as I just could not stand the thought of all that nasty touching me and getting underneath my fingernails. I then moved onto the turning-the-chair-upside-down technique. I realized later that this is probably what caused my little black cell phone to end up wedged in what can only be described as the Bermuda Triangle of the La-Z-Boy.

So, if the turning it upside down technique didn't work, then the next rational technique would be rotating the chair through various positions - on the side, on its back, on its side again. That would surely do the trick, right? Not so much. After about an hour of such effort, a little bit of cell phone clunking sounds, and at least 30 calls to myself to try and pinpoint the exact location of the phone in the chair, I realized it was time to call in the big guns.

The big guns that were sawing logs like a bear in hibernation. The big guns that would not really understand the importance of getting a cell phone out of a chair in the middle of the night. The big guns that would rescue a damsel in distress. I hate being the damsel in distress, but my phone is a part of me. Like my arm. Or my legs. Or my sight. Or my hearing. Absolutely necessary. Even at midnight.

Long story short, after 20 minutes of intricate surgerical procedures, Dr. Laz E. Boy (and he sometimes is) extracted my beloved cell phone from that mean, hungry chair. Really. We needed a scalpel and suction. Okay, okay...really just kitchen scissors and a vacuum, but let's just say that I performed some extaordinary surgical nurse techniques. Like making sure the chair didn't fall on top of the doc. And sterilizing the O.R. by sweeping up all the debris. And continuing to repeatedly call the cell phone so we could tell if it had moved. Primitive techniques, people. No x-ray or ultrasound machines needed here.

And there's a bonus (or two, or three) to this random, middle-of-the-night event - we are now $0.41 richer, found the fluorescent orange Polly Pocket shoe that has been missing for like months, and since I didn't make it to the grocery store the past few days, now have some goldfish crackers for snacktime!

Score! Now I have some "Mommy Points" to offset the "Dumb Blonde Points" that I sometimes accrue through little things like leaving my cell phone sitting next to me while I watch TV and then having it accidently be eaten by the chair. Or something like that.