it was about 9:15 this morning... which is the time i am supposed to get landon to daycare... and i was getting into the elevator to do just that. i hit the ground floor button in the elevator and grabbed my cell phone to see what time it was...

now wait... pause my story and let me explain something about the elevators here. they are about a quarter of the size of an american elevator (if that big) and they don't all necessarily have doors. you get in, optionally close the doors, if there are any, and hit the button to the choose the floor... at that point the elevator proceeds to move and the wall which would be on the other side of the doors in the USA elevators is right in front of your face and you get to watch it go on by.

okay so back to my story... so like i said, i was grabbing my cell phone and as the phone was exiting my pocket it slipped out of my hands. it hit the ground near the wall, bounced and i froze in terror... and then the worst possible thing happened... it slipped through the one inch gap between the elevator and the moving wall. now we live on the 6th floor and i had only just passed the 5th floor... and my phone proceeded to plummet 5 floors probably bouncing off the crusty cement walls along the way to what i imagined to be it's dirty and dusty demise (because the shaft bottom is full of dirt, rocks, used car tires and other misc. trash).

i didn't have time to start looking for it in the elevator shaft right away because landon... remember landon and his daycare that has already started? ... well as you well know, he was late for daycare. so i got him to daycare and the whole way there and back i was imagining my cell phone in all its glorious splendor in what i figured was about 30+ glorious parts.

well once i got back i got my building manager to help me jerry rig the door (this is a door that stays put on each floor to keep people from falling in the shaft) to open while the elevator wasn't there. so once he did he jumped on down into the murky depths below and after a minute handed me a dusty but completely intact and functional cell phone! it had been cushioned by the ample amounts of trash.

i was astounded and continued to thank him for helping me and more importantly thanking the Lord for my cell phone surviving its astronomical fall.

this story kinda reminded me of those people you hear about that went skydiving and whose parachutes didn't open... they fall all the way to the bottom, hit the earth, bounce something like 50 feet in the air and then live to tell the tale! it's exactly like that... except that my cell phone was only like 6 months old and those people are usually in their 20-30s.

the end.