Slappy, thinkin' 'bout flyin' furniture and refrigerators brings to mind an amusing inident many years back. At the time, I lived in a pretty nice 4th floor walkup with a couple other guys. The place was pretty big - an old Victorian with 3 goodsized bedrooms, 2 full baths, a real den, a huge living room, and a dining room almost as large. Great view, too, with awesome bay windows. But the kitchen was tiny. It came to pass one day that the refrigerator - a huge old thing, a veritable relic, crapped out. A little back-and-forth with the landlord was required, but a few days later, a couple fellas huff-and-puff a new refrigerator up the 4 flights of stairs. They install the new one, but leave the old one, sayin' they'd only been paid to deliver, not to haul away. A bit more back-and-forth with the landlord follows, without effect.
The back of the building overlooked a small, sorta decrepit, junk-strewn courtyard, and each of the apartments (1 to a floor) had a fair-sized wooden deck/porch out back. Tired of squeezing past the deceased behemoth in the tiny kitchen, we wrestled the beast out onto the deck. More back-and-forth, ineffectual, with the landlord over several more days. Late one football Sunday afternoon, we're pretty well tanked, and one of the guys calls the landlord about the damned thing again. A real argument ensues. Finally, the landlord, evidently exasperated, shouts loudly enough even for the two of us not on the phone to hear quite clearly, "I don't give a damn what you do with it - throw it into the courtyard, for all I care!"
OK - reasonable. We set about to do just that. Took some effort, but among the 3 of us, there was enough muscle to heft the puppy up over the porch railing and start it on its roughly 45-50 foot final journey. The power cord snags on the porch rail. The massive projectile at the other end wasn't slowed a whit, but its trajectory shifted some. It swung sharply inward, tucking neatly into the space directly below our porch, detached itself from its power cord, impacted the 3rd floor porch deck with a helluva thud, causing most of that structure instantly to shear from the building and proceed unfettered but quite noisily to the 2cnd floor porch, which with a great deal more noise pancaked onto the first floor porch, bringing about even more noise, and the settling of that structure the remaing couple feet to the ground - then silence, with a whole buncha dust billowing about. All of this took far less time to happen than it takes to tell the tale.
We were impressed, and highly amused. The landlord, however, failed to see the humor of it all, and some considerable inconvenience followed in short order. We moved on.
Sumbich kept our security deposit, too.
