Comments on Boy Stuck in a Vending Machine

Go to Can You Believe This?Add a commentGo to Boy Stuck in a Vending Machine

That sounds like
something my husband would do... when he was younger of course.. crawling up the machine that is, not stuffing the bead up his nose.

posted by tigerprincess on May 24, 2005 at 8:57 PM | link to this | reply

Majroj
:)  That is funny.  Hey, who can tell when that lightning bolt of inspiration will hit us.  It could have been the ambiance of the Moose...or the Tickle Me Elmo doll she had just won who started telling her stuff in her ear.  That Elmo...

posted by terpgirl30 on May 23, 2005 at 4:53 PM | link to this | reply

Motivation questions? At a Moose karaoke?
I'm remembering a scenario in the movie "Toy Story" with a toy machine........

posted by majroj on May 23, 2005 at 12:37 PM | link to this | reply

I knew this would happen

We met my mom for dinner last night.  (Karaoke at the Moose Lodge---does life get better?)  I told her I had written this post. 

The FIRST thing out of her mouth was:   "Do  you remember when you stuck your head through the wrought iron!!!"  They NEVER forget.  In her defense, my daughter's bead up the nose story is a real bedtime tale for her children.  I can't wait.  I loved that her boyfriend kept asking me, "Why would you do that?"  He was very serious. 

posted by terpgirl30 on May 22, 2005 at 9:00 AM | link to this | reply

Saul

I agree with the photo thing...unless she's holding it out to show the kid's first girlfriend.  That's something I would do.  Like "See what you're getting into.  Don't turn your back on him for a minute."

I'm in jest.

I remember vividly taking my daughter into K-Mart about a week before Christmas. A boy was writhing around, shrieking for his mother to boy him some toy.  My daughter was about 6.  She looked at me very seriously, shook her head and said, "He'd never get away with that with you."  It's a pain in the rear to take kids out of stores and restaurants when they are going crazy, but like you said, to let them continue gives serious mixed signals.

When I was little, I decided to get my mother's attention for something I wanted by banging my head on the floor. She came up along side me, held the back of my head and took it to the floor saying, "Here let me help you."  I thought she was flat out crazy, and stopped immediately.  I guess I get my sense of kids from her.  (She confided it killed her to do that, of course.)

Later,  friend of mine had a child who threw herself to the ground in my home kicking and screaming about something stupid.  I grabbed my friend by the arm and dragged her into the other room, repeating the mantra, "Walk over her body. Don't look back."  Well, no one was there to give her the attention she wanted, and she stopped. 

Parenting is tough, and parenting right is worse given how many people try to get in your way.  If you do it right one or two times, you head it off at the pass.  Let it go, and you have a problem for years to come. 

posted by terpgirl30 on May 21, 2005 at 10:22 PM | link to this | reply

hey, terpgirl30, we've blogged the same story, but a little different
on the take.  I thought the entire episode irresponsible and reflective of today's lackluster parenting skills.  I'm glad she didn't reward the little hellion a plushy.  At the same time, someone needs to tell her that buying a camera and taking a picture of her little darling's antics with the rest of the Wally World shoppers wasn't the best course of action to take either.  Talk about mixed signals.  No, you can't/oh, you look so adorable in there/no, you can't.  What the ...?

posted by saul_relative on May 21, 2005 at 9:10 PM | link to this | reply

terpgirl, I did see that bit of news today.   I like the way that you elucidated on it in your blog post.

posted by TAPS. on May 21, 2005 at 6:51 PM | link to this | reply

When my oldest son was a little one he had a thing for olives.
. The olives were the big black kind. I was prepping Thanksgiving dinner and he was 'helping' me. I turned my back for just a moment. When I turned back around his face had a vague resembalance to Marlon Brando in "The Godfather" Somehow he had managed to shove that entire can of olives into his mouth., with the exception of two. Those were up his nose. To this day I have no eartly idea how he did it. At least it wasn't pocket change.

posted by I-R-William on May 21, 2005 at 10:32 AM | link to this | reply

Chris/Mark

Chris, you win.  And I'm sure the laugh you thought you'd get was a good enough reason for a chile pepper.  I was sure apples were going to grow in my head, and my mom did nothing to stop the thought.  As for getting the toy..Chris, I'm sure he got something, but it wasn't a toy.

Mark, you know my first thought was to try to win the kid back.  The first question is, "why."  Maybe God wanted him in there.  Since his mother didn't see the whole thing, maybe there was some divine intervention, and God wanted him to live in a claw machine.  You'd be messing with karma.

Beyond that, I've never won anything from those machines, so I think the kid would have been stuck forever.  But *someone* would have won him.  Again, a sign from God. 

It's sort of like the dog theory.  Dog eats the diamond ring, and the vet says, it will pass.  Well, the kid got in there.  I've seen America's Funniest Videos.  If someone held a toy he wanted outside the glass, he'd work his way out again.  Then you thwart the fun of the Jaws of Life guys.  And they love that stuff.

posted by terpgirl30 on May 21, 2005 at 8:49 AM | link to this | reply

I think the nose is the hole of choice for a child...

I shoved two chilli peppers up each nostril when I was five.  They were green in colour, the joke being that I had two bogies coming out my nose.  And then came the burning and crying.

I bet that kid was gutted he didn't get a toy...he should have got something for trying so hard.

posted by chris2303 on May 21, 2005 at 7:17 AM | link to this | reply

So give the cops a roll of quarters and let them have some fun, too.
Who wouldn't wanna snag a kids head in a set of pincers?  I'll bring donuts.

posted by mark2556 on May 21, 2005 at 7:09 AM | link to this | reply

Mark,
I like that idea, but then someone would have called the police.  The old child endangerment deal.  And she probably would have had the cuffs slapped on by an adrenaline-crazed rookie, causing the kid to crash onto the floor.  You know she would have been further charged with Assault & Battery for that.  What self-repecting cop is going to admit to being a dodo?  They would have been faced with the old ''fess or press'' situation.  You know how that one goes down.   JJ

posted by Jack_Flash on May 21, 2005 at 6:59 AM | link to this | reply

Jeez ~  Couldn't his mother have dropped a quarter in the machine and tried to dump back out with the little grappling crane?  Heck, I'd have given it a try.  But if they had a stuffed badger in there I'm afraid Junior would be out of luck.

posted by mark2556 on May 21, 2005 at 6:24 AM | link to this | reply

terpgirl, you are a nut!
but I mean that in a good way... I enjoyed your tales of misadventure...

posted by FactorFiction on May 21, 2005 at 6:12 AM | link to this | reply

SpitFire

I'm not a small girl. I think I was born at 5'6" and went from there, but I did something similar. It didn't involve steel, so I hadn't thought about it here.  And I was an adult. 

I lived in a rancher, and had devised a plan for eluding anyone breaking into the place.  I could get to my bedroom and crawl out a window to a neighbor's house.  The real contingency plan involved the bathroom.  (I saw a contest on here for funny bathroom stories, but I think they mean a different kind.)  We had a laundry chute, not even the width of a good hamper, mind you.  The window was only the width of the top of the toilet tank, so if someone came in the house, and you were in the bathroo, you weren't getting out.

But I was.

I'd decided I could slip down the laundry chute (and,  yes, I could have ---then) to the basement, and go out the back door. 

This is all because I didn't want to think about firing a gun if someone broke into my home.

Well, I got pregnant, and you get all those thoughts.  My daughter's room was down the hall, and an intruder would get to her before me.  My plan started to unravel.  I was a good 8 months pregnant, weepy and huge, as I stood in my bathroom one day.  It dawned on me that I wasn't fitting my big behind down the laundry chute anymore.  If I tried to go out the window, they'd find me like that Winnie the Pooh episode where  he ate all the honey and got stuck.   There wouldn't be enough Crisco in the world to get me out. It was a bad day for me. 

Once my daughter was born, I realized I was Clint Eastwood, and I'd rather go down the hall, so the crisis was averted. Who knew?

But I was an adult!  What would make me think about going done a laundry chute anyway.  Maybe it's just some sort of human urge just to "see if we can."  You know it had to run through my mind as a "what if" long before I built the "escape the robber" story.

posted by terpgirl30 on May 21, 2005 at 4:28 AM | link to this | reply

I was so small (well, obviously, I still am so I was REALLY small as
a little girl) and one time, I hid in a hamper while playing hide n' seek with my brother and our two cousins. I wasn't found for A LONG TIME. I was pretty smart to hide inside of that, however, um, I didn't get out cause, well, I got stuck.

posted by SpitFire70 on May 20, 2005 at 9:59 PM | link to this | reply

We had a thriteen year old try to liberate his un-vended soda once.

(1979, so the machine was easier to reach into and probnably only weighed about five hundred pounds and not like the monsters nowadays).

It was a Saturday, and we responded to the call in the Base Gym. Someone had unplugged the machine, but it was still icy cold and the vending company rep was a couple hours out, had to go to the headquarters in Omaha for the keys etc.

No he didn't.

The boy's parents had to pay for the machine's replacement because, to keep him from having a frozen arm, we took the door off with the Jaws of Life.

(Guy time. Ten-thousand pounds of pressure concentrated through two one by two inch metal grip pads....heh heh heh, Tool Time sound effects...

gr-r--r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-POP!).

And no, he didn't get the soda.

posted by majroj on May 20, 2005 at 7:13 PM | link to this | reply

I got the bright idea

to try and stick my head between the wrought iron slats of the railing of our home.  Stupid move. I think I had to get my head greased.  Again, it always seems like a good idea to a kid.

I guess it was like the time I was home with strep throat for a week.  The attic was made into about the coolest bedroom you could want.  So there I was on my own resting, or so my mother thought.  I was bored.  I had opened my second floor window, put on hat, scarf and gloves, scooped snow off my roof and pelted my neighbors as they walked by.  It was fun while it lasted, but I paid for it.

posted by terpgirl30 on May 20, 2005 at 6:52 PM | link to this | reply

Never in my life.
Have I heard something like that before. My brother can bend his arm up into the vending machines for candy and stuff.. It's pretty neat. lol ^.^!

posted by hatomi on May 20, 2005 at 5:03 PM | link to this | reply