My Best Kindle Fire Story -- So Far

by Jean
(Waukegan, Illinois)

My friend Mary gave me her slightly used first generation Kindle Fire because she did not love it, and because she thought I would love it.

I was dog-sitting in Chicago for a week. The dog is smart and gentle, but has no skills that would apply to the problem I encountered.

Late in the morning of my first day there, I felt the call of nature and retreated to the restroom. I had been listening to a fabulous library book on my Kindle Fire, and took it into the restroom so that I could continue to listen. Things went as one might expect.

The section that I was listening to was telling the story of a doctor who was in a hotel in Italy during WW II; the hotel was bombed and the doctor was confined to a bathtub by a collapsed ceiling. It was ten days before he was rescued.

When it was time for me to leave the bathroom, I grasped the door handle, twisted it, and pulled. The knob came off in my hand. I looked at the spindle to which the knob had been attached. It was unremarkable. I tried to simply push the knob back onto the spindle.

It did not work. Indeed, the spindle retreated further into the door. There were no tools in the bathroom: no tweezers, no pliers, hammers, removable handles on plumbing fixtures, or rubber bands. There was no carpet. There was no window through which I could climb, and there was not a dropped ceiling that I could have climbed into. I sat on the marble floor and thought very serious thoughts. I was very glad that the bathroom was not in a bombed building. I had great hopes that I would not have to wait ten days for rescue; both the dog and I would have become very hungry.

At last I used the Kindle's internet capability and emailed the dog owner. She was at the airport, waiting to board her flight to Europe. She begged me to call her, but alas, I had no phone in the bathroom. I emailed the owner again and asked her to call the dog walker to seek rescue.

The owner emailed me that she was panicking, and that she might have to call the police. I was locked in a bathroom and SHE was panicking???

A couple of hours later, the dog walker came. Apparently the owner had called the main office of the dog walking business, and they had relayed the message. I was rescued.

This was all because of the Kindle Fire that Mary gave me. Without it, I would still be locked in a marble bathroom, trying to think of clever ways to make an escape.