A Friends Disaster That Made Me Laugh…
Everyone knows that I am always in the zip code or in the airplane if something bizarre is going to happen. That makes it so refreshing when I hear one of my friends tell me a story about an escapade that they were involved in (and that I was not involved in).
This evening a group of us are in Houston for a meeting and decided to go to the Spaghetti Warehouse for dinner. The waitress was very abrupt during her initial visit to our table. I smiled and said “good evening, looks like you all are busy tonight..” She responded with a dismissive “..what ever..” and walked off. So, it appeared that our dinner was going to do down in flames when my friend Scott showed us his new I-Phone and told us the story about how he got it.
The story begins when Scott, his wife and three dogs decide to go hiking near their home in Maryland. They are several miles down the trail when one of the dogs decides to stop for a drink in the river that is running along the hiking path. The water level is about a foot below the grade of the path and their large labrador mix dog leans too far forward and falls into the river. Without hesitation (because like me, Scott is a dog lover), Scott jumps into the edge of the river, expecting it to be no more than knee deep. To Scott’s horror, he vanishes in the icy water over his head. Scott comes to the surface and grabs hold of the dog , which weighs about 85 pounds, and works to tread water while keeping the dog afloat.
As Scott is trying to push the dog up onto the shore his wife decides to help by leaning over the edge to grab the collie. As Scott gives another push to move the dog up, his wife slips and tumbles into the river, landing on top of the collie and they both vanish under the water. Moments later his wife surfaces coughing and choking and a few seconds later the dog pops up above the surface. In spite of being a dog lover, Scott grabs his wife and helps keep her afloat.
At this point, the second of the three dogs is watching the commotion from the hiking trail and decides that this is some type of canine game and Scott looks up just as the second dog (a large mixed breed) dives off the bank into the river.
The water is very cold but luckily there is almost no current to move everyone downstream. Scott, his wife and two dogs are now treading water trying to devise a plan to get back up on the shore. I would also be pondering the exercise benefits of a home treadmill in lieu of a dangerous hiking trip. Scott is able to grab a tree branch and use that as leverage to hoist his wife and the two dogs back up on shore and then to finally rescue himself.
During their 30 minute walk back to the car, Scott realizes that his I-Phone was in his pants pocket and his wife then realizes that her corporate Blackberry was also in her pocket. Both devices are totally dead, (a status they will never recover from). Luckily, a call to 911 was not needed (this time), or there would have been a problem. Scott also said that there was no one else on the hiking trail so there were no witnesses to the tragedy. That is unfortunate because this would clearly be a first place winner on American’s Funniest Videos.
So, Scott now has a brand new I-Phone and also has a Ziplock plastic bag for future hiking adventures.
Everyone on our team is laughing which helped keep us calm when the waitress advised us that she could not split our checks in spite of our need to manage separate travel expense accounts.