Stuck in an Elevator Shaft

Tonight marks the first night I've done laundry since the Great Elevator Shaft debacle. I have enough clothes to avoid doing laundry for quite some time. It's been maybe 9 or 10 days since there have been any clean clothes added to the garment reserve. The impetus to finally lug the loads of laundry the three fllights of stairs down to the sole coin-op Maytag Dependable Care topload washing machine was having to wear the same underwear two days in a row. Enough said.

Last time I did laundry, I had just finished doing some grocery shopping (yes, I am an excellent domestic husband). At the store, I had bought a fifth of Irish Whiskey. My wife and I do not drink wine. I like beer, but it's really fattening. The thing about Irish whiskey though, is that once you start drinking it, it just gets better and better. Consequently, we like to ration ourselves to those little pint bottles you can buy at the liqour stores. Keeps us from getting in too much trouble. They don't sell those small bottles at our local Albertsons supermarket.

I stood there, loading the laundry into the machine, thinking about the fifth on the kitchen counter. I started thinking about drunken laundry. What could go wrong? I don't see any PSA's warning against getting sauced while sorting, carrying or washing clothes. No one says Don't Drink and Do Laundry. There are no Mothers Against Laundering Drunk. Amused and confident I avoided the stairs going back up by using our 50 year old elevator.

On the next trip, I was carrying a load of dry clothes back upstairs. I was wearing my pajama bottoms, which have no pockets. I need my keys to navigate the doors of our apartment complex, and perhaps a little drunkenly, while both hands were in use carrying the basket, I decided to tuck my keys over the elastic in the pajama pants. I'd done this before, and it works. When the elevator got to my level, I leaned forward to manually push open the outer door of the elevator.

Plop! There went my keys, out of the elastic waistband. They actually bounced but yet they kept skidding forward. There was this one tantalizing moment where I had just and instant to decide if I could prevent them from that fatal plunge. I hesitated. A critical mass of my keys crossed into that little crack between the elevator floor and the floor outside and they were gone. Gone into that inaccessible abyss of the elevator shaft. There was a pause, and then I heard the crash of keys falling from very high up.

Damn. Nothing can go wrong drunken washing... yeah right.