Trouble in the Basement

A few weeks ago I went down to the basement to put a load of laundry in the dryer. I pushed the start button and nothing happened. The buttons were lit and I could hear the motor trying to spin, but nothing moved. I couldn't believe it. How could our barely year old dryer already be broken? After telling Jeff about it and cooling off, I called to have a repairman come look at it. Two days later, the repairman came to our house and I nervously showed him the dryer and explained to him the problem. I left the laundry room assuming that in a few minutes I would get the bad news- resulting in a large, several hundred dollar service fee, of course. Instead, the repairman showed me this.

Apparently, our dear son Asher had decided to somehow find a dirty sponge (that Jeff had used to clean our grill) and carefully insert it in the slot where the lint filter fits. The repairman tried to give Asher the benefit of the doubt by saying that maybe the sponge somehow accidentally got sucked into the lint trap, but I could tell that he himself didn't believe it. And since nothing was actually broken and the repairman hardly spent anytime at our house, he didn't even charge us a service fee!

The incident reminded me and Jeff of a couple of similar stories. Our nephew Matthew once put a grilled cheese sandwich in a VCR, and our friends' son Isaac put a tortilla in a DVD player. You gotta hand it to kids; they're curious, creative, and experimental, and as long as no one gets hurt, is there really any harm done?