Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (20 page)

I
have heard this one so many times that I’ve stopped counting. I’ve heard it from actual grocery store clerks, both in Arizona and Florida, who swear they’ve heard it live!

A beautiful woman went shopping in a grocery store. After reaching the check-out counter, the clerk, also female, asked her, “Will there be anything else, Ma’am?”

“Well, yes, there is,” the shopper replied. “I looked for a box of Tampax on the shelves, but I couldn’t find it.”

“No problem,” the clerk said, grabbing the store microphone. “Stock boy,” her voice boomed over the loudspeaker. “We need a box of Tampax at Register Three.”

The woman grew embarrassed, waiting, as all the other shoppers were looking at her, smiling.

In the back room, two stock boys were working, listening to the announcement.

“What do they want?” the first stock boy inquired.

“Thumbtacks,” the stock boy who had just entered said.

The first stock boy grabbed his own microphone and boomed his own message over the loudspeaker: “Do you want the kind you push in with your finger, or the kind you pound in with a hammer?”

The shopper fled the store without waiting for an explanation.

Sent to me in 1987 by Kevin Fellman of Phoenix; I earlier got the same story from readers in Texas and Connecticut, and a student of mine told me that she had heard it told during a training session for grocery-store cashiers. In some versions the stock boy inquires over the loudspeaker, “What happened to that price check you wanted on a box of thumbtacks?” In 1996 David Altom of St. Louis, Missouri, reported to me that his fiancée and a friend actually heard the Tampax/thumbtacks dialogue broadcast over a loudspeaker at a local Target store. I suspect that this was a deliberate prank carried out by someone who had heard the old story.

Modern urban legends
are full of warnings against the imaginary hazards of everyday life—hook-handed killers, lethal tanning rays, exploding toilets, spider-infested cacti, and the like. When you hear horror stories told repeatedly about these supposed dangers, with many a variation and never a verifiable detail, you know you’re in legend land.

But what about plausible, simpler, and less structured warning stories that you hear or read about? Many of them concern occupational health and safety, a genuine concern of workers and employers. Other such stories deal with common aspects of daily life. These accident stories sound suspiciously legendary, since they often describe incidents that seem to be pretty darn unlikely, if not impossible.

To illustrate: here’s a story that I got in 1991 from Dan Shaffer of Bloomington, Indiana, a carpenter who had heard, as he wrote, “many stories of unlikely work-related disasters.” These are stories like “The Lethal Sanding Machine” that Shaffer was told by a coworker who did floor sanding:

To me this sounds like an apocryphal warning story intended to drill into a workman’s head, so to speak, the importance of using the equipment properly. But what are the odds that the man would be directly below the sander when it fell through the floor? I checked this out with the company that refinished some floors in my house, and learned two things—these workmen had heard the same story with several variations, and they insisted that it couldn’t happen, given the safety features on sanding machines.

A British reader clipped an item describing a rumored auto hazard from a 1991 issue of the
Evening Standard
(London). It was headlined “Beware: Garfield can set your car on fire.” The gist of the story was that “the plastic suckers which secure Garfield cats to windscreens can cause fires.” Supposedly, if the “suckers” (suction cups) are transparent, they focus the sun’s rays like lenses and may start a fire inside your car.

The news story concluded with the information that “Two manufacturers of transparent suckers were alerted and had responded helpfully.”

I wonder if these company reps said something similar to what my reader did in her letter forwarding the clipping: “Garfield’s a glutton, YES; but a pyromaniac? NO!”

I agree, since other automobile gadgets—including many radar detectors—are also held to windshields with suction cups, commonly transparent ones, and I’ve never heard of any of these cups starting fires. In fact, I even tried to focus sunlight with one of these suction cups and got nowhere, since they tend to disperse light, not concentrate it. Another thing: I don’t think the sun ever shone brightly enough or often enough in Merry England to constitute a genuine danger of this kind. But it’s the story that counts, isn’t it?

A woman from Minnesota sent me a doubtful accident story she’d heard several years ago from, as she wrote, “science-minded kids in southern California.” Supposedly a woman disregarded the warning labels on some household products she was using and mixed together several floor-cleaning and -waxing products, with tragic results. She put the mixture on the floor, and once it dried it became a contact explosive. When she stepped into her clean room, BANG!

I suspect that this unlikely story was invented by someone who was plain sick and tired of cleaning and waxing floors. On the other hand, as several chemists have since informed me, a mixture of something called “aqueous ammonia” and solid iodine creates something called “nitrogen triiodide ammoniate” (NI
³
NH
³
), which is a stable compound when wet but an extremely sensitive contact explosive when dry. So perhaps a day-dreaming Chem 101 student dreamed up the legend.

Describing another accident hazard on the home front, here are the opening sentences from a 1990 article in the
Chicago Sun-Times:

Thus began
Sun-Times
food editor Bev Bennett’s interview with Lorna Sass, author of a book called
Cooking under Pressure.

My own mother, aunts, grandmothers, etc., never used pressure cookers, so I’m not familiar with this genre of accident stories. But my mother-in-law does cook under pressure, and she assures me that her cooker blew up once. Frankly, I can’t see much potential for interesting legends here. What’s there to say, besides who was there and what was inside when the pot exploded?

I prefer more detailed accident legends; so, back to the Chem lab. Here’s one a New York reader heard from her eighth-grade general science teacher when he was demonstrating the properties of liquid nitrogen:

When I repeated that story to students in one of my folklore classes, three of them recited variations: The thumb had shattered. The teacher lost a whole hand. The flying frozen digit struck a student, causing frostbite.

Steve Seidman of Ithaca, New York, in 1990 sent me some further Chem lab “sodium stories” that fit in nicely here. Pure metallic sodium is highly active chemically and must be handled with care and stored submerged in oil. In high school, Seidman heard of a student who, despite the teacher’s warning, secretly cut a small chunk from the sodium block in the chemistry lab and stuck it in his pocket. Later, moisture from the student’s perspiration ignited the sodium and set his pants on fire. Another story claimed that a janitor accidentally disposed of some sodium by putting it down a drain. When it hit the water in the pipes, sparks flew from the drain in another classroom, temporarily blinding several students.

Most such accident stories, though grounded in fact, seem to drift slightly beyond the plausible. The following tale, sent in 1990 by Nick Wolf of Columbus, Ohio, drifts further than most:

What a lot to expect from a factory worker—to perform neat surgery under pressure, while risking infection from the same gas!

Finally, here’s another accident story about reacting to pressure, but with a happier result. I got this one in a letter from Robert M. Ryan, who said the story was going around among undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s. It concerns final examinations at MIT, which Ryan described as being “three-hour, red hot, hellers.” The fourth-floor room in which the exam was being held on a June afternoon was also super hot. As the instructor went down the rows passing out exam papers, there was much muttering, moaning, and groaning from the students. Then one student walked to a window and started to open it to let more air in the room.

Misunderstanding the student’s intent, the instructor ran towards him shouting, “No! Don’t Jump! Don’t Jump!” With that, the whole class collapsed in laughter, and the tension was relieved.

That’s something like the top blowing off a pressure cooker, or like steam escaping from a safety valve. And, as Robert Ryan concluded his story, “If this didn’t happen, it should have.”

Accidents
do
happen, as the proverb states, and people are bound to talk about accidents they have suffered, witnessed, or even just heard or read about. What converts the accounts of plausible, if unverified, accidents into genuine urban legends is the process of repeated transmission. By this means the stories become pointed and more ironic, sometimes laughable but with a tinge of horror, and—above all—they become irresistible to repeat and repeat and repeat….

“Give Me a High Three”

I
heard my father tell this story when I was a little girl, and I believed it until last summer when I told it at a party and a man told me that it had been floating around for years. Have you heard it?

A man is working at a factory. His job is to feed something into a machine that has a big part that stamps down on it. (I know that this sounds fuzzy, but I first heard it when I was about five and the technical details were lost on me.)

He is careless, and he gets his thumb caught in the machine; it stamps down and smashes his thumb off. He goes into shock and just stands there, dazed. The foreman comes over to see what’s wrong, and when he sees that the man is bleeding, and his thumb is gone, says, “My God! How did that happen?!”

The man says, “Just like this!” and he shoves his other hand into the machinery and loses the other thumb.

In a letter from Karen Urbanowski of Rossford, Ohio, sent to me in March 1989. This story has been told since at least the turn of the century, usually with reference to pieces of farm machinery or to sawmills. Sometimes it was toes that were lost. Often the older story involved an ethnic stereotype, with the Norwegian or Swedish or Italian or Irish victim exclaiming, as he loses a second digit, something like “Voops! Dere goes anudder vun!” Later the legend migrated to assembly plants and other factories, where it continues to be told as a “true” story. In modern versions, often the workman is asked by an attractive woman touring the plant how he lost a finger; he demonstrates with a gesture…and loses another one.

“The Lawn Mower Accident”

S
everal years ago, when I took a lawn mower in for repairs, just to make conversation I asked the shopkeeper what was the worst mower accident he had run into. Well, he said, this didn’t happen to anyone he knew personally, but he had heard of a mower accident in which sixteen fingers were cut off the hands of two men who were holding a power mower over a hedge to trim the top of the hedge. It didn’t get their thumbs because they were outside the blade area. Let’s hope all those fingers were put back on the right owners!

From a 1982 letter sent to folklorist Ernest Baughman, professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico. Baughman, a specialist in Anglo-American folk narratives, published some of the pioneering work on urban legends in the 1940s and ’50s; he died in 1990. Usually just one man lifts the mower and loses the tips of four fingers; then he makes an insurance claim against the manufacturer for failing to warn users of the potential harm when lifting the mower. In September 1977 several insurance-company ads running in national publications claimed that “The Lawn Mower Accident” was true and that the suit had actually been filed. But an article in the October 31, 1977, issue of the trade journal
Advertising Age
called it instead, “The case of the missing case.” The article traced the story to an insurance executive who said he read a newspaper account of the accident in either late 1975 or early ’76. He repeated the story to business and political acquaintances, and they in turn repeated it to others, varying the details as they did so. Neither the original news story nor records of any such court case were found. In a 1986 article in
Consumer Reports
titled “The Manufactured Crisis,” the story of the lawn mower used to trim fingers as well as hedges was called one of the “favorite horror stories” among insurers. The article concluded, “The tale has been repeated dozens of times in support of the notion that consumers injure themselves foolishly and then seek out greedy lawyers to bring groundless lawsuits. But the story was purely apocryphal.” An editorial in the November 1989 issue of the trade journal
Machine Design
repeated “The Lawn Mower Accident” once again, but a letter to the editor published in the January 11, 1990, issue stated, “A friend contacted all U.S. manufacturers of lawn mowers and many insurance companies. They had all heard of the case, but none had been involved.” Legal scholar Anita Johnson had debunked the same story back in 1978, in the journal
Forum,
in an article titled “Behind the Hype on Product Liability.”