Stuck in the car

An ordinary trip to the gas station was anything but for a Saginaw, Mich., man in March.

Victor Harris was trying to pour some gas treatment into his Lincoln Navigator at a 7-Eleven when he noticed a small piece of paper had somehow fallen into the gas tank opening.

“I just tried to put my little finger in there, just rub it off,” Harris told WJRT ABC. “My finger just slipped in there—it was like, ‘Dang, it won’t come out.’”

Harris tried for two hours to get his finger out of his gas tank. He finally called a friend, and some co-workers even stopped by, but Harris remained stuck.

At this point Harris began to lose feeling in his fingers, so his friends stopped laughing at him long enough to call the fire department.

Emergency personnel were on the scene for another two hours and were finally able to free Harris. Sort of.

Unable to extract Harris’s finger at the scene, emergency crews were forced to saw a hole in his SUV so that they could transport Harris, along with the gas tank door and part of the filler pipe still attached to his finger, to the hospital. Thirty minutes later, Harris was finally free and his finger required just two stitches.

Harris said his four-and-a-half-hour ordeal taught him a very important lesson: “Don’t stick my finger back in the gas tank. Shoot.”

The labyrinth of left turns

A German motorist had to be rescued from a roundabout in March after taking at least 50 laps around the intersection.

“I was breaking in a new car to see how it does in traffic and I couldn’t seem to get to one of the exits,” 62-year-old Andrea Zimmer told police.

Other motorists noticed that Zimmer couldn’t figure out how to get out of the roundabout and called police. Two squad cars were eventually able to guide her off one of the exits.

The episode wasn’t a total waste for Zimmer. “I have to admit I got a very good feel for my new car and its handling,” she said. “I think I can safely say it takes roundabouts pretty well.”

Buckle up, dummy!

A Washington State Patrol trooper only thought he was pulling over one dummy on I-405 outside of Bellevue earlier this year. When he got a look inside the car, he realized he had caught two.

The officer was on patrol during the afternoon rush hour when he spotted a Honda Civic in the carpool lane with an unbuckled passenger. As the officer drove up to the Civic, the passenger didn’t even make an attempt to put on his seat belt, so the officer pulled the car over.

As he approached the driver’s window, the officer realized that the passenger was actually a plastic dummy. The driver had draped a rain jacket over some plastic piping and placed a Styrofoam ball on top, over which he placed a Halloween mask of the wizard Gandalf from “The Lord of the Rings.” Not wishing to draw attention, Gandalf also was wearing a fake beard and a baseball cap.

The dummy in the driver’s seat told the officer that he had gotten fed up sitting in rush-hour traffic and, despite his wife’s warnings, had started using Gandalf as a way to illegally slip into the carpool lane. He might have gotten away with it, too, if he had just remembered that everyone has to buckle up, even wizards from Middle-earth.

Unfortunately, Gandalf’s magic couldn’t save the man from a $124 ticket.