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Well, right now I am stuck in Angola for Christmas and New Year.

...

While bad, I doubt it's as bad as those stuck in a warzone or offshore this time of year. You have my sympathies.

I read that as "Well, right now I am stuck in Angela..." and was wondering what wonderful anecdote could possibly follow.

I can't say I'm not disappointed, but sucks you're stuck abroad.

Well, my colleague, who lives 10 minutes away from our main office (as opposed to my 1,5hr drive), has "assisted" in the planning and conveniently planned in 6 weeks of holidays for himself (2 more than the usual 8-4 rotation we have).
Means he's home for the holiday season leaving me and a few colleagues stuck here in West-Africa working.

Normally I wouldn't mind this - one year it's you, the next year it should be him, but this is not the first time he's pulled a stunt like this.

I do have this one story

It all started with a threesome...

Trying to get home post February Quake in Christchurch, footpath had given way and liquid faction had come up and covered it up, got stuck up to the upper thigh in liquid faction. Took 3 guys to drag me out.

Also I handcuffed one of my hands to a leg one time, took a while to get out of that.
Got a clothes hanger stuck around my waist one time during the "Fit through a clothes hanger" trick.
Stuck in a tree at a friends house. His special needs brother came out to help me down.
Got locked into a suitcase by my middle brother.

Been trapped away from home 3 times during snow.

Lost count of the times I've been left somewhere and had to wander for hours to get back to home, or civilisation.

Got stuck in an elevator for an hour once. With 5 other people.

That wasn't fun.


Got stuck in New Caledonia just after the turn of the millennium. Not a bad place to get stuck either, and thankfully as my dad knew the manager of the hotel he had our rooms waiting for us when we got back, as he had a feeling the planes wouldn't be flying that day.

I got stuck in an elevator too but then with only 2 people but for 2 hours. WHile doing something for school

Went swimming in a lake a few hours away from home, car keys were in my pocket for some reason and they decided they liked the bottom of the lake better.

Stuck for a few hours for a parent to get off work then drive over to where I was to bring a key.

Mattman154 wrote:
Went swimming in a lake a few hours away from home, car keys were in my pocket for some reason and they decided they liked the bottom of the lake better.

Stuck for a few hours for a parent to get off work then drive over to where I was to bring a key.

That almost happened to my brother and I. We were camping, and he'd borrowed our parents car to drive all of us there, so no alternate transportation from friends. The valley had no cell phone reception. To walk out would have taken days.

He was canoeing with one friend, who decided capsizing the canoe was a cool idea. As he fell in the water, he felt the car keys in his pocket slip out.

He stuck his hand down in the dark, murky water and grabbed... the falling keys.

THey stayed on dry land after that.

 -Loki- wrote:

Mattman154 wrote:
Went swimming in a lake a few hours away from home, car keys were in my pocket for some reason and they decided they liked the bottom of the lake better.

Stuck for a few hours for a parent to get off work then drive over to where I was to bring a key.

That almost happened to my brother and I. We were camping, and he'd borrowed our parents car to drive all of us there, so no alternate transportation from friends. The valley had no cell phone reception. To walk out would have taken days.

He was canoeing with one friend, who decided capsizing the canoe was a cool idea. As he fell in the water, he felt the car keys in his pocket slip out.

He stuck his hand down in the dark, murky water and grabbed... the falling keys.

THey stayed on dry land after that.

Damn good save!

Got stuck in Butte, Montana while on a bus trip... bus arrived at 11 pm, next bus left at 3 am. And the bar across the street closed at 1.

Second worse was getting stuck at Syracuse, NY airport after it closed due to a delay in Detroit. Had to wait a couple hours for a ride to my final destination.

I was stuck in a broken down car for 3 hours waiting for pick up. Not that bad but bloody boring and although I was tired I couldn't go to sleep due to needing to talk to the tow bloke.

So damn hard not to make a homestuck reference here...

On saturday night I came back from a crappy party (pretty drunk) to a locked house... I was sat outside in cold December rain for about 5 hours until my mum came down to take the bins out at around 6am.

Back when I was doing research into livestock diseases, I got up early one day and drove to Cork from Dubin. That took me about 4-5 hours. I collected some samples of milk which had been treated with a high concentration of a particularly nasty (and explosive) poison to kill off any brucellosis in there.

I drove back with my samples in a beer cooler in the back of my car. (We were well provided with budget as you can see).

Before I'd left, I'd asked the lab tech, who was notoriously erratic, to please leave the door of the lab open for me, since for whatever reason he wouldn't issue me with a key (love University admin!). When I got there, rather predictably, it was locked. My samples were supposed to either be refridgerated or processed the day I got them, and it's not really acceptable to leave a beer cooler full of highly poisoned and potentially explosive milk in the corridor unsupervised. It was now about 10pm. I called the campus security, who answered in pidgin english. I explained my situation. He said something about sending someone over and hung up. I waited until midnight, sitting on the floor, and called again. I got a similar response. Repeat at 2am. Finally a guy who spoke only a little english came around. I explained my situation to him, and asked him if he could please let me drop my samples into the fridge. He looked uncertain and said he had to confirm. 2 hours later (4am now) he came back, telling me he'd called his manager and she'd said I couldn't go in there because if I was supposed to be in the lab I'd have been given a key. So. I had to sit there until 7am until other people started filing in, and then spend 4 hours processing my samples while extremely tired (need I mention again their highly toxic nature) and then go to a meeting with my boss.

Yeah. I don't miss academia at all.

Flying to GenCon, the most reasonable ticket was Houston to Dallas to Milwaukee, Wisconsin (this was 2001 or 2002).

My plane from Houston was delayed from noon until 8 or 9 PM due to weather. I could have driven to Dallas in that time. When I arrived in Dallas, the last plane to Milwaukee had just taken off. Got to a hotel around 12:30 AM. I spent a night in Dallas and woke up at 4 AM to get to the airport to leave at 6:30 AM, missing a HackMaster tournament I had signed up for.

Not the worst experience, but it still sucked.

I got stuck with an arrow at summer camp, once.

 rubiksnoob wrote:
I got stuck with an arrow at summer camp, once.

Only once?

I got stuck in a thermometer once. At least I used that as an excuse for something when I was four or five.

There's a joke about Selma Blair in here somewhere.

 whembly wrote:

 rubiksnoob wrote:
I got stuck with an arrow at summer camp, once.

Only once?

Only once with an arrow.

When I was a teenager I got stuck in Boston on Memorial Day weekend one time. I went down Friday night for a gaming thing, and was driving (my first car; an '86 Chevy Cavalier) several folks over from MIT to one of their apartments to hang out, and my brake line went, in the middle of heavy traffic, and I hit a cab from behind. Thankfully it was at very low speed and there were no passengers; the cabbie brushed it off and let us go. I then limped the car to my friend's apartment using the hand brake, and we considered the fact that no garages would be open anytime that weekend. On the plus side, the girl I was seeing (my second girlfriend) was in the crew, so passing the time was pleasant.

I did have to get home the next day, though, but the girl whose apartment at which we were staying managed to get a hold of her brother, who did some auto work. In return for me buying him a new set of wrenches, he plugged & capped the brake line, re-filled my fluid, and I got back to NH on three working brakes.

 dogma wrote:
There's a joke about Selma Blair in here somewhere.

That's a pretty good movie. One of my exes was a big fan; she and her friends would sing the penis song on occasion.