Where did you spend Christmas Eve?
Wherever it was, it had to be a lot better than the place Robert Schoff found himself in.
The 77-year-old Des Moines, Iowa man began his holiday with a toilet problem. So he went out to his septic tank and tried to remove the clog. Instead, it removed him. The senior lost his balance and fell into the slop, with his head trapped inside and his feet kicking wildly in the air. The 5'5", 135-lbs. man tried yelling for help at the top of his lungs but no one heard him.
He stayed that way for about an hour unable to escape his smelly predicament until his wife began to wonder where her husband disappeared to. Toni Schoff walked by a window, saw his feet emerging from the opening and quickly rushed outside. But even that didn't help. "I saw these kicking feet and ran out, but couldn't get him out," she recalls.
Eventually 911 and fire officials rushed to the scene and pulled him to safety. A long shower followed. "I thought it was the end of my life," he reflects. "Thank God my wife saw me. I don't think I could have stood staying in there much more."
As for his holiday? "It wasn't good, I'll tell you what," he admits. "It was the worst Christmas Eve I've ever had."
This reminds me of a story about my first father-in-law. It seems that one brisk winter morning, he went to the outhouse to take a dump - and he saw a garter snake down below.
You can't hardly blame the garter snake. It would have been warm. But Don was afraid that the garter snake might bite him. And considering what dangles down, that's the last place he wanted a snake bite.
"If a rattlesnake bits you on the butt, that's when you find who your real friends are," Don would explain, although he knew garter snakes weren't poisonous.
He ran into the house, and got his shotgun, then ran out and shot the garter snake. The load of buckshot created what physicists would call "an equal and opposite reaction". Don's wife made him strip off all his clothes in the snow, and rinse himself off thoroughly with a garden hose, before she would allow him into the house.
The idea of a cold shower, while standing in the snow, makes me think that maybe getting bit by a garter snake might be a better fate....