A plastic knife, a vent, a coupon, and a piece of red hot cinnamon gum

If you're wondering what you can do with a plastic knife, a vent, a coupon and a piece of red hot cinnamon gum, let me tell you...

I was shopping at Bashas'-- a grocery store here in Arizona. At the time, I was grabbing Pillsbury Grand Bisquits off the shelf. As I was sorting through my many (already sorted) coupons, trying to figure out how many I actually had, to know how many I needed to grab-- something horrible happened.

I had NO IDEA I WAS STANDING ABOVE THE ONLY AIR/DRAINING VENT IN THE ENTIRE GROCERY STORE! And all of the sudden a coupon slipped out of my hand and floated gracefully down to the floor where it managed to miraculously slip into the only horizontal vent hole on the vent.

Fortunately it was still retrievable but very difficult. The vent was partially covered by those huge, incredibly heavy refidgerated product cases (as shown to the left)-- so we couldn't take off the vent cover. There was about a 3 inch drop from the vent top to the bottom of the hole the vent was covering. On top of that, the hole was slightly filled wtih about two cups of water. And my poor fat fingers could not reach the coupon!

I'm sure you're thinking--- dude, it's just a coupon BUT this coupon was my ticket to a FREE pint of Breyer's Reeses Peanut Butter Cup Ice Cream! (Those of you who know me, know I LOVE Reeses Peanut Butter Cups!) And as Andrew always says, "It's really hard to beat free! The only thing that beats free is being paid to do it". ... so I couldn't back down, I was deteremined to get the coupon.

I embarrassingly walked over to the deli that was close by and asked if they had anything long that I could borrow. Questioning why, I told a kid that was probably a few years yonger than me, my situation. He couldn't believe it and thought that this was the most entertainment he'd had all day. He had no idea that the grocery store even had a floor vent (just as I had no idea). He took it upon himself to get that coupon out of the vent, as I had. He peaked down the vent and saw the coupon, knew he couldn't grab it and immediately asked if I had a piece of gum. I said maybe and as I was looking through my purse to find it he ran behind the deli counter. He came back with a plastic knife. While I found my ONE AND ONLY piece of gum (cinnamon flavoured) that I had in my purse, he then asked me to chew on it a while. After making small chat and chewing on the gum, we then stuck it on the end of the knife. Then stuffed the knife through the vent-- the gum barely fit through the vent hole. He stabbed the coupon with my gum a few times but the gum was too wet (apparently I have a lot of saliva). I blew into the vent hoping to dry the gum a little bit then tried again. We got it to stick to the gum!-- but then we couldn't get the coupon to fit through the vent properly with out having it fall back into the water. So with his two hands and my two hands we got the coupon as close as possible to the vent holes and then I stuck my fingers through the hole and grabbed the coupon.

It was a SUCCESS. I got my coupon! The Bashas' Employee was so proud! He said "now with all that work you better go get yourself some ice cream!" So as I was headed over there to grab the ice cream, I could hear the boy 4 aisles down, telling his manager and all the other employees that passed his exciting story. What are the chances that I JUST SO HAPPENED to be standing above a vent and that the coupon JUST SO HAPPENED to fall AND fit through the holes??? AND I of course, was in a hurry to get my shopping down before all the stores closed and sales ended.

As I went down the aisle to grab the ice cream, I found out that we went through all that work to find out they were out of Breyer's ice cream! :( I had to get a rain check.