Monday, April 9, 2018

Good morning crew,

This weekend the wife took her two nephews to an escape room, and I went along for emotional support. She bought the tickets as a Christmas present, but it took a while for her to get those two, young, teenage bucks to carve an entire Saturday afternoon out of their social schedules. I don't really have a social schedule, so it wasn't an issue for me.

If you've never been to an escape room it is kind of like a puzzle that you stand inside. The room is locked, and there is only one way out (other than kicking a hole in the wall) and you have to figure the one way out by looking for clues and solving puzzles.

I didn't have any experience with escape rooms before this weekend, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but the one thing I did not expect was for the four of us to be ushered into a dark, filthy, disgusting bathroom. Why a bathroom, I don't know. There wasn't a theme, like a haunted house. Maybe it was a haunted bathroom. It was dimly lit, and there was barely room enough for the four of us to stand hock-and-jowl (or shoulder-to-shoulder if you prefer a less agrarian metaphor). There was a young woman, an employee, monitoring the adventure, and she told us it wasn't a real toilet, after I asked if I could pee in the commode, but even still I was a little hesitant to touch too much.

And really, that inhibited my participation in the exercise. That and the fact that I couldn't see anything. The wife and the two boys had their cell phones out shining light into corners and under shelves, but without a cell phone to act as a flashlight all I could do was sort of run my hands over the walls.

To be perfectly honest, if I were by myself I would probably STILL be standing in that room, because the first task was to find a key hidden in the room, and the wife discovered it by sticking her bare hand down the toilet. That just never would have occurred to me. That key unlocked a little panel in the wall that connected our room with an adjacent room where four other people were solving their own puzzles.

I don't want to go into any boring details, but by passing things back and forth between the rooms through the little bolt hole we were finally able to open the door where we found ourselves in another room with the four people we had just been passing things back and forth with. So now there were 8 people crammed into a space about the size of an office cubicle. This activity would NOT be recommended for anybody with even mild claustrofobia. All I can say is that I'm really glad everybody decided to shower that morning.

There were three rooms in all and it took us just shy of 30 minutes to find all the keys and solve all the little riddles that got us through them. It was an adventure. Somthing I had never done before. But then I try to keep my hands out of public toilets.

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

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"An 80-year-old man in Arizona is on trial for robbing a bank. Apparently, he slipped the teller a note that said, 'Do you know why I came in here?'" -Jimmy Fallon

***
"A California woman has turned her home into a sanctuary for 1,000 cats. She's applied for both tax and man exempt status." -Conan O'Brien

***
"New Jersey is considering a bill that would outlaw texting while walking, and make it punishable by 15 days in jail. And according to a new poll, people kept running into it." -Seth Meyers

***
A group of junior-level executives were participating in a management training program. The seminar leader pounded home his point about the need to make decisions and take action on these decisions.

"For instance," he said, "if you had five frogs on a log and three of them decided to jump, how many frogs would you have left on the log?"

The answers from the group were unanimous: "Two."

"Wrong," replied the speaker, "there would still be five because there is a difference between deciding to jump and jumping."




*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
Now that the metric system is in wide use all over the world, we can see why American have not adopted it:

A miss is as good as 1.6 kilometers.
Put your best .3 of a meter forward.
Spare the 5.03 meters and spoil the child.
Twenty-eight grams of prevention is worth 453 grams of cure.
Give a man 2.5 centimeters and he'll take 1.6 kilometers.
Peter Piper picked 8.8 liters of pickled peppers.