Pirated Anecdotes

It's been a little hard to come up with posts lately, because let's face it- my life doesn't exactly generate interesting stories on a daily basis. It's a lot easier when life throws me gems that basically write themselves, but when I'm having a nice, mundane Office Space like week, I can always steal stories from my friends.

So here are some selections from our lunchtime conversations last week that were worth relaying. Remember, this is second hand, so all details are approximate.

It started with talk of Dana's impending baby shower- she commented that she was ready for a barrage of flame-retardant pajamas. That lead me to ask why kid's clothes are fire proof, and at what age do parents decide that their kids are ready for flammable clothing. Do you have a little party, like with potty training? Like, "we're not worried you're going to catch on fire anymore?" Dana said that it's some federal regulation. Simple enough. But this lead to my favorite conversation transition in recent memory:

Kim: "I caught on fire once."

At this point I'll mention that no one was hurt in any of these stories, so that makes them funny! Turns out that Kim was welding (I don't know what or why, but since it was Kim it doesn't seem too out of the ordinary) and she felt some heat and smelled smoke. She looked down only to see her shirt aflame. She said her first grade safety training immediately kicked in and all she could think was "Stop, Drop and Roll!" Unfortunately, she soon found that there was no floor space available to roll around in. After a few moments of frantic searching, she ended gave up the hunt and beat the fire out with a glove. She was fine, but apparently it burned though her sweatshirt and t-shirt underneath.

This touched off a slew of fire related stories from the room, which quickly yielded a revelation: Apparently, girls don't play with fire, while it's a standard rite of passage for boys. Ben and I were full of stories, but Kim and Dana's all started with "One time my brother..."

One of Ben's offerings was the time he made a super whipper-snapper. For those that don't spreken zie Mid-Western, I'm referring to those little fireworks that explode when you throw them at the ground or your friends (I've also seen them called "snap pops" or something). In any case, this is something else that I figured everyone tried at some point in life: You unroll a bunch of individual whipper snappers, collect that nice volatile gunpowder mixture, and combine it into a larger mega-snapper. Of course I have done this. But we always put four or five whipper snappers worth into one original casing- not Ben.

Apparently, Ben had a whole box and a free afternoon to work with, so he unrolled a hundred or so of the little guys to collect the magic dust while his parents were out. When he had a sufficient pile, he put in it a kleenex where he attempted to make a whipper snapper that he estimates to be the size of "a small orange."

When he tried to give it the signature twist at the end, he learned that whatever advantage the mega snapper had gained in size had not bought any more stability. Ben said that when he twisted the paper, his brain barely had time to process the powdery grinding sensation before he felt the shockwave of heat, the blinding flash and deafening report.

I think he said he fell over backward in his chair, but when he stood up, ears ringing, he could see through the smoke that he, the walls and the table were covered with spots of carbon-y combustion byproduct. So, he quickly opened all the windows to air out the smoke and signature firework smell and hurriedly cleaned up everything else. He said his parents never found out, which means he did a passable job of cleaning, as well as pretending he could hear what everyone was saying at dinner that night.

So he walked away unscathed. He said the worst part was that he spent all day working on the mega-snapper, only to have it explode unexpectedly before he was done. So that's a lesson to all the kids out there: If you're going to construct a giant whipper-snapper, either keep it small or be really, really careful. And you should probably wear safety goggles as well. And maybe, like, do it in the garage.