Here’s a reprint from July 29, 2005, it’s by far one of my favorites.

The silent screen

One day Hubby found himself locked out of the house, so he cut two small holes in the screen window in our dining room, slid the screen up, and crawled in. He took the screen off and put it in the basement so that bugs couldn’t get in through the holes. Somehow it became my responsibility to take the screen to be repaired. Don’t ask me how, but it was, and since I’m all about procrastination — the screen sat in the basement for quite some time.

One day he hands it to me as I’m walking out the door to go to the Y. I was in a hurry, so I didn’t even look closely at the screen. I just grabbed it, and dropped it off hardware store.

The next week he picked it up. As he walked into the dining room with it, I eyed up the screen, and then the window, back to the screen again, and then back to the window.

Uh oh, he had the wrong screen.

Our dining room windows are tall and narrow, like 42”x 20″, and the screen he had was more square, probably 30″ x 30″.

Me: That’s not the right screen
Hubby: Sure it is.
Me: It’s not going to fit.
Hubby: Yes it will, just watch, you don’t do it right.

So I sat and watched as he tried to jam this square screen into a rectangular window.

Me: it doesn’t have the clippy things to slide the screen up and down in the window
Hubby: Hmmmm maybe this isn’t the right screen.

We went down to the basement, and sure enough, leaning against the cement wall was the dining room screen, holes and all.

Do you want the know what the most hilarious part of this story is? When we brought back the screen from the hardware store the second time, it was also the wrong size to fit the window. Thinking we were going out of our minds, we accepted defeat and put it in the basement, next to the other new screen.

Months later the hardware store called to ask, when will you be picking up your screen window?

What? It’s still there?

Of course it was. We had someone else’s screen. We still can’t figure out what window that first one belongs to.

We’ve since moved out of that house, but when we cleaned out the basement we made sure to leave the odd screen, just to drive the new owners absolutely crazy.