Common-man's issues … times 10

You think you have problems?

———

Don’t stop me when you’ve heard this one before because, hey, who hasn’t done this: put something important somewhere safe, out of the place, where you’d remember (totally, absolutely, remember) because it was obviously the best, most memorable, hence perfect, place for it. Totally and absolutely.

And then you lost it in that perfectly memorable place. Totally and absolutely.

No matter what you put where for whatever reason and lost for however long, this probably tops it.

The retiring President James E. Douthat of Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pa., was cleaning out his office closet in recent days and discovered a signed document given to the founder of the college by President Abraham Lincoln, reported Joseph Stender of Williamsport’s SunGazette.com Tuesday, June 11, 2013.

Stender reported that no one at the college knew how it got to the closet after being donated to the college in 1959 by a great-grandson of the founder.

Douthat, who thought the frame for the document was a door to a utility access point, told the Sun-Gazette that he recalled hearing of the document, and added to Pamville News reporters that he thought it was a college legend, like the perfect panty-raid that supposedly happened in the 1970s or the one about the professor who … well, nevermind.

———

There's this, too:

Pamville Random Statistics Generator Inc. says that 97.52 percent of people have had at least three of the following four disaster nightmares:

• falling or toppling out of control

• drowning

• being stuck in the dark while knowing sinister things are going on around you; and

• some kind of embarrassing and/or gross incident having to do with bathrooms

PRSG Inc. also says you are more likely to get hit by lightning — twice — than have all those dream elements at once, in one nightmare. And more likely to win a large lottery jackpot — thrice — than to have the dreams come true all at once, in one real-life incident.

Meet lucky winner Harrison Okene from Warri, Nigeria.

Okene was working on a tugboat about 20 miles off the coast of Nigeria when a massive storm hit May 26, reported Joe Brock of Reuters Wednesday, June 12, 2013.

And Okene was in the bathroom when the ship flipped over.

Okene told Brock that he forced open the door of the bathroom in time to see three of his crew mates swept away to their deaths.

As the ship sank, an air pocket formed in the tiny bathroom and that is where Okene survived, in the dark and the cold, 60 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, listening to the fish eat the decomposing bodies of his crew mates while trying to keep his head above water — for two-and-a-half days.

He was the only crew member of 12 recovered alive.

He told Brock he's not sure if he can recover from the PTSD well enough to go back to work at sea.

PRSG Inc. polls reveal that 8 of 10 people would rather become a homeless person dining al fresca from dumpsters than head back out to open waters.

———

Then there’s the surgeon who used surgical superglue to fix a three-week-old baby’s brain.

Bill Briggs of NBCNews.com reported June 5 that surgeons at The University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City, Kan., repaired an aneurysm, which would have normally been fatal, by gluing shut the defective blood vessel.

On a personal note, the kid is lucky. My dad would’ve performed the procedure himself at home and cinched the vessel of with tightly wound duct tape, but only because wood glue and a clamp isn’t as effective in soft, wet places such as a brain.

My father-in-law, though, he would’ve went with JB Weld, all the way.

(In reality, 94 percent of all statistics are made up at pam@viewfromthenorth40.com.)