DIBS First, Ask Questions Later

Since I'm such a fan of free stuff, I'm always on the lookout for giveaways and coupons and stuff like that. Whenever I hear someone start a sentence with, "Hey, does anybody want…" I immediately say "DIBS!" And I usually do it before they even finish their sentence. That's how I've gotten a free pool table, a Duracell induction charging station, a digital copy of Inception, and (perhaps most impressively) a Spicy Chicken Biscuit from Chick-fil-A. So when someone at our church emailed everyone last week saying they had some bunk beds they were giving away, my wife and I emailed immediately (even though she wouldn't let me respond with a simple "DIBS!").

The catch was that I had to go to their house and dismantle them, load them into my car, and unload them into my house once I got home. A small price to pay for beds that are stackable. And step 1 went smoothly. I dismantled the bed pretty quickly. But loading the bed components was a nightmare. It wasn't for lack of room. I'm very adept at packing a car with boards and beams. It was the mattresses being tied to the roof-rack that became the problem.

Now if it was just me doing it, it would have taken about three minutes. But as luck would have it, the family that gave us the beds is a family of scouts. Their son is a Boy Scout and the wife is the troop leader. And I'm fairly sure the husband can build a fire with wet pinecones and a piece of cement. The problem was that they had special knots they wanted to use to tie the mattresses down. And they spent a good 10 minutes just deciding which knot would be best for each corner. Then they took another 5 minutes on each knot, making sure the mattresses were secure enough to survive driving them through a hurricane. Even if my car was torn apart by 650 mile/hour winds, the mattresses would still be tied securely to the roof-rack.

Then I got home and had to untie each of their 12 different knots to unload everything. Now my fingers hurt and I'm not convinced they weren't messing with me.