This is a tale about a child who managed to get himself trapped in an air duct. Our story begins with our young adventurer chilling contentedly in a hot tub. All was peaceful in the land of his grandparents, and the boy was slowly sipping his lemonade, enjoying the gift of cool water on his bare torso. Suddenly, a string of curse words that would put any rapper to shame alerted the boy of an issue in the house. Grudgingly the boy went to check on the commotion inside when he found that his grandmother had managed to lock the keys inside the closet. Naturally, the next course of events would have the child’s grandmother asking for him to retrieve the keys from the closet. Initially the boy declined, citing claims that he would rather chill in a hot tub then try to get keys out of a closet. There was fuss over the child’s loyalty to the cause, but in the end the child conceded. Smitten by the opportunity of a chicken dinner, our hero vowed to stop at nothing until he had retrieved the keys from the mythical closet. So as the boy’s grandmother went to the kitchen to prepare the meal the boy so desperately craved, our hero finally faced the daunting task of retrieving the lost keys from ages past.

As our hero approaches the fortress that is the supply closet, he realizes that there are no easy weaknesses in the security of the structure that he can exploit. Unfazed, the boy takes a deep breath, backs up a few feet, gets a running start, and charges into the door with a head of steam. He still has scars on his elbows to this day. Wincing, our hero realizes that the weakest link in the door was the lock itself. However, the boy had not yet mastered the art of lock picking. However, our hero found a bobby pin, bent it straight and began fishing around the lock, thus learning in that instant how a standard pin and tumbler lock worked. There were various methods none of which actually worked. After about an hour and a half of fishing around in the lock to no avail, a different method for infiltrating the supply closet began to formulate in the child’s mind. He had just seen a James Bond movie the night before and decided that the only practical course of action at that point (short of knocking down a wall of course) was to get into the air ducts and hope that somehow he could traverse the metal abyss, knock out the grill on the other side, and retrieve the keys. Easier said than done, as the child would soon learn. Still dripping with water from the pool, the child retrieved the sacred screwdriver set from the ancient toolbox that his family has had since the 50’s (apparently there still using a set of shears for 1897) and took off a vent from the air duct. The boy shimmied his way into the vent, learning his first lesson. Air ducts are not as big as the movies would suggest. Shrugging off that bit of knowledge, our adventurer continues on his quest to reach the closet. The seemingly simple passage of air duct that the boy was previously in transformed into a catacomb of various metal tubes, pipes, vents, and various other bits and pieces that go into an AC unit.

A drought had fallen upon the land of the grandparents, and thusly the air conditioning was turned up to high. A maximum overdrive on the cooling if you will. The hero was still damp from his brief siesta in the hot tub. It was one of the most traumatic experiences of our young hero’s life. Cold, and woefully lost, the child wanders aimlessly into the catacombs of the air conditioning unit, until he reached an A/C highway of sorts. It was there the boy learned he was not alone. A colony of insects called this place home as well. And as our hero soon learned, the bit. A lot. Horrified, and fearing for his life, the hero retreated to the narrowest passageway he could muster, in an effort to escape from the oncoming barrage of insects who wanted nothing more than his blood. It was in this instant that the child got stuck. The child, well and truly in a state of panic at this point, began flailing about in an attempt to free himself from the clutches of the air vent. It didn’t work. Stuck, chilled to the bone, and woefully lost, the child screamed out in the hopes of making it known that there was indeed a child stuck in an air vent. Our hero soon learned, that his grandmother was in the shower. She would not exit the bathroom for another half hour. It was possibly the most agonizing half hour of the child’s life. Upon his grandmother exiting of the bathroom, she must have heard the great commotion being created by our hero. She looked up, and muttered:

“Not again…” and proceeded to call the authorities. For whatever reason, she knew the person on the other end of the telephone, began to have a conversation about the weather, than remembered the child in the air vent, and finally had the fire department dispatched to the scene. About 20 minutes later, the firemen arrived (this was probably pretty low on their agenda). The boy was greeted by 2 gruff individuals wearing no discernable uniform, cigars dangling low from their mouths, armed with nothing more than a sledgehammer and a pair of cutters. Finding the child was a fiasco in itself. The men instructed the child to direct them to his location by playing a high stakes version of “hotter colder”. This went on for about 5 minutes at which point the men decided that this was taking too long. They proceeded to smash through the roof to expose the bowels of the A/C unit. As fate would have it, they broke through in the exactly correct location. Then, the men took the metal cutters (think safety scissors on steroids) and began to cut around the boy. It appeared to the boy that they had done this before, because in a military-drill style, they cut the section of the air duct that the boy was in a time that any drill sergeant would have begun to tear up. In an equally impressive manner, they cut the boy out of the section in question, and without one word, the men left. The boy, free, frozen, and chilled to the bone felt like he had accomplished something for a fleeting moment. That was until his grandmother asked for the key. The boy promptly went to the local shaman and learned the art of lock picking. He bought a lock pick set (they are scarily easy to obtain) and promptly unlocked the sacred storage closet. It was there that our hero retrieved the keys that he had longed so dearly for. His task completed, he brought the fruits of his labor to his grandmother. But when our hero asked for the chicken dinner that he was promised, he learned that in the midst of his fiasco in the air vents, the chicken had burned in the oven. Abashed, hungry and tired, our hero went back to the hot tub, and attempted to forget the events of the day. It didn't work.