The tale of the dog in the boot

I had a lovely trip home this evening. Get yourself a cuppa, unfortunately it’s a long tale. I know this sounds like an urban myth but I heard this in the first hand so I choose to believe.
I got on the train and as I walked further into the carriage I could hear peels of laughter coming from downstairs.
Laughter is a magnet to me, so I went down there and sat, smiling, just in front of two middle aged woman (lets call them Jane and Sue ) who were in the helpless throws of a long, loud belly laugh.
Sue had a newspaper open and was reading aloud a story about a middle aged couple in Victoria who had decided to take an impromptu weekend break away camping. They had packed the Kombi Van, left the washing up in the sink, the back door open (accidently) and took off to camping grounds unknown and out of range of the usual modes of modern communication.
When they arrived home 2 days later they were surprised and concerned to find that their house had been taped off by police as a crime scene. As they pulled into the drive they disturbed police digging up their front yard and fingerprinting door and window frames. The yard was full of media and neighbours and their hysterical eldest daughter who was convinced they had been kidnapped and murdered by a homicidal maniac.
I remembered the story from the news the night before and how funny it was that the roles had been reversed on the daughter. She was mighty cranky with Ma and Pa, very funny.
Anyway, the two in front were in stitches of laughter as one of them read aloud to the other. They both lost it when Sue got to the bit about the daughter’s reaction as her parents got out of the Kombi. She flew at them, firstly in relief that they were ok then as reality seeped in she turned into the shrew from hell. She was yelling at her parents that they were irresponsible, thoughtless, immature, stupid, cruel, rude etc etc and all this was being beamed live into millions of Aussie homes. A brilliant bit of great Australian Television Drama/Comedy really.
Both of the ladies reading this were wiping tears of laughter from their eyes and I was too.
Then, Jane turned to Sue and said speaking of children being painful; she wasn’t speaking to her eldest daughter and had grounded her for a month.
Jane parks her car at a really big railway station car park every morning. One night she returned to the car and noticed that the boot was open. Upon closer inspection, the boot lid had been mashed and beaten and couldn’t be closed. The passenger window was smashed and the glove box cover was lying on the floor of the car.
‘Fantastic’ she thought. She was going to call the police from the car park but had left her phone at home that day, so she decided to drive home and report it from there. There was a card on the windscreen and a handwritten note on the driver’s seat.
In shock she read the note …. ‘you mongrel’ ‘you sick f ‘ ‘glad I could rip your car to shreds for you’
Jane thought that there was a slight misunderstanding here, since when do you get abused if someone breaks into your car and finds nothing to steal? She felt a bit scared just sitting there in the car as she didn’t know if the person who left the note (and had a tantrum at not finding money in the car) was watching her so she drove home.
When Jane’s husband saw the state of the car he threw a fit (car was less than 12 months old)
The card that had been left on the windscreen was from a Policeman who wrote on the back to call him ASAP.
Instead of calling they went to the police station.
Jane’s hubby apparently has a temper. She and Sue were laughing about the fact that his face looked like a capsicum and there was puffs of smoke and lots of steam coming from somewhere under his hair.
The drive to the police station was similar to a circuit of the track at Bathurst in a formula one. In fact Jane didn’t feel the tyres on the road once.
Hubby marches into the cop shop and demands to talk to the bloke on the card, he is seething.
This huge copper comes out. (making Hubby cool down instantly) The policeman asks them to sit down with him in his office so that he can explain why he needed to speak to them.
At 11am triple O had received a call from a very distressed male who reported that a Mitsubishi Magna was parked in a parking station in full sun with a dog locked inside. The dog was barking and sounded distressed.
Jane and Hubby looked at each other. ‘But what has this got to do with us, we don’t have a dog’
The Policeman said that they had the entire incident recorded and ‘I can assure you that there is a dog barking in your car’
Jane got cranky then. ‘ well that’s just ridiculous, I would have seen a dog in my car for God’s sake, I drove it to the station, I cant stand dogs, I think I would have noticed if there was one in the car with me’
‘Mrs ----------, please, it is all recorded, bear with me please, I will play it to you in a moment.’
He played the OOO call, the man calling was very upset and they could hear a dog barking in the background. The man was yelling at the operator that he couldn’t see past the tint in the windows but could hear the dog inside (as could the operator) and he wanted permission to break the window. The operator wouldn’t give permission and told the man to wait by the car, police were on their way.
The policeman told Jan and Hubby that a car was dispatched immediately but was 10 minutes away.
In the meantime the man was repeatedly calling, he was almost in tears, the dog sounded frantic.
The operator gave permission to smash the window. Jane and Hubby … WHAT!!!’
The policeman tried to explain. ‘you have to understand, the dog was very distressed, so was the man. It was over 30 degrees today, that dog would have been dead in minutes’
The man used his mobile phone to smash the window and they could hear him screaming that the dog was in the boot not in the car. The dispatcher is heard telling him that the boot lever should be in the glove box (which was locked). They could hear the man smashing the glove box and they could also hear the dog barking louder.
The dispatcher was heard telling the man that the police were only a few seconds away please wait.
Screaming … ‘its like an oven in here, can you hear the dog, OMG how do you open this’
The police are heard to arrive. Lots of smashing and ripping (apparently the boot being forced) total silence and then a click as the phone is disconnected.
Jane and Hubby look at each other. ‘Well????’
There was no dog in the boot, only a mobile phone. Jane’s mobile phone.
The policeman was explaining that seeing that there was fault on all sides so he couldn’t really prosecute the man for breaking into the car, the police wouldn’t accept any blame for busting the boot and Jane didn’t know she had left the phone in the car. Best to just let it go as a break in and the police would forget about fining them for creating a public nuisance.
Jane and Hubby are in shock and leave the police station in silence both not quite sure what had happened.

In the car Hubby asks in a very tight little voice ‘you have a f***ing dog barking ring tone?’
They had to pull over, Jane and Hubby had an enormous blue right there in the car which resulted in Jane getting out and walking home.
When she walked in the front door of their house she could hear her Hubby screaming abuse at the kids about the phone, the police, their mother in jail, the car wrecked etc.
Angry that he was taking it out on them she went into the lounge room to see her eldest daughter being held by the neck up against the wall by Hubby.
Jane’s daughter changed the ring tone on her mum’s phone to a dog barking and had made a joke of it when Hubby got back home. (of course she had no idea what had happened)
Jane had her bag in the boot and the phone fell out when she got to the station. Thinking of how much her mum disliked dogs, her technology ignorance and how funny it would be to have a dog barking near the desk and not being able to figure out what was going on, she kept ringing and ringing and ringing the phone, convinced her mother was running around in a tizz looking for a non existent dog.
By this stage of the story, Sue is doubled up laughing. Jane is pretending to still be cranky and half the train is mesmerised and hanging for the ending.
Jane’s daughter has had all her fingers amputated, is grounded for life and will work for 30 years as a sewerage sifter to pay for the damage to the car. (In Hubby’s imagination) in reality she is grounded, neither parent is speaking to her and she is working for the next 30 years at KFC to pay for the damage to the car.

Mango Madness

Mango

How do you eat a mango?

Personally I like to strip off and get into a bath full of hot water and whilst I’m soaking away the day’s trials and tribulations I slice delicate strips off a nice ripe, juicy mango and savour the tropical luxurious taste. The hot water serves as a relaxant but also doubles as a cleanser for the volumes of sticky juice that runs down your arms and face and chin as you eat. Win win.

My husband wraps himself in paper serviettes, leans over the kitchen sink and eats a mango secure in the knowledge that that juice aint going no where but down the drain

Of the brief survey of people who eat mangos, I observed one thing they all had in common, no one eats them in public and everyone takes rather drastic steps to make sure the juice is contained.

Too big, too messy, too juicy, you look greedy, like a pig etc

So imagine my surprise this afternoon when I sat down in a ‘my lemon’ and was diverted from my usual book trance by the sounds of a woman ‘really enjoying’ eating a mango not 2 seats away from me.

There was a noise like a thousand starving pigs digging truffles out of a boggy forest floor.
Grunting and slurping and lip smacking, she had the mango wrapped in a plastic woollies shopping bag so it wouldn’t drip all over her and she had her face buried up to her eyebrows in it.
I have seen starving dogs with better manners. In fact she made a Labrador look like a June Daly Watkins graduate.
If you looked closely, you could see her eyes are glazed while her lower jaw methodically tearing bits of flesh off the mango while her upper teeth held the seed in place.
Her lips were acting as a drip tray for any stray juice or chunks of wayward flesh, her tongue was scooping up the slag from her bottom teeth and throwing it to the back of her throat where it was held until it was a full load. Her adam’s apple then, acting as a plunger, pushing all that pulverised pulp down into her gullet.
And worse, the clamour she was making. It defies description, but I’ll try (you knew I would)
Think an Olympic swimming pool, a huge drain hole in the middle with a plug in it. Fill the swimming pool with custard sauce and pull the plug. The row the custard would make trying to get down that plug hole is about on par with the racket she was making with that mango.
OR think giant dentists saliva sucker with a turbo booster.
Every time the guard made an announcement she would pause in her porcine performance with small bits of mango flesh hanging off her cheeks because even she couldn’t hear anything over her munching and slurping.

The other passengers are all in shock at this incredible display of – what – bad manners just doesn’t seem to cover it.

I have heard people say that a mango is the king of fruit, there is nothing to compare to the rich, sumptuous, silky taste, a fruit to fight for, a fruit to die for, a fruit to become a pig for.
Well, it’s true, proof is sitting just inches from me, she is already a pig, she is gunna fight me when I rip it out of her hands and she is certainly going to die when I shove it down her throat.