The Slice: Realizing your thinking has gotten uptight

It has come to my attention that some people are not meticulous about cleaning their car’s rear license plate before affixing a new annual registration sticker.

This is incomprehensible to me.

Call me anal retentive, but wouldn’t you want to make sure the plate is clean and dry before sticking on the new tab?

One more thing. Does worrying about stuff like that suggest one’s counterculture days (such as they were) are really and truly over?

Slice answer: “When my teachers (from grade school up to Cal Berkeley) learned I was the younger brother of Charlie, I was treated as the teacher’s pet even though I was an Eddie Haskell,” wrote Boris Slayman. “God only knows how I got away with it.”

Today’s stuffed-in-a-locker stories: “Yes, it did happen,” wrote Sue Plummer.

Back in 1961, when she was a freshman at Lewis and Clark High School, her locker had a remarkably simple combination – 1-7. And it was not much of a secret.

So Sue wasn’t all that surprised when she opened her locker one day and found a boy named Doug Hay inside.

“I said, ‘Hi, Doug.’

“He said, ‘Hi’ and stepped out.”

Sort of like a rider casually exiting a crowded subway car.

“Doug was small for a freshman, but he grew to be a regular-sized guy who wound up being an engineer in Chicago, I think.”

Ernest Boyd admits he might have been a bit of a Poindexter back in junior high on the West Side in the early 1970s. But does any kid, even an academic achiever, deserve to be stuffed into a locker? Of course, not.

“The door bulged and they couldn’t open the locker with a combination. Must have been stuck for 10 minutes until they could get a janitor. Had to be broken open and I’ve had neck trouble ever since.”

Slice answer: “I came into this summer a wimpy white woman,” wrote May Cotton. “I go out a bronzed Amazon.”

Warm-up questions: What do you do when you notice a co-worker has fallen asleep on the job? Does the prevalence of remote control door-openers mean motorists in 2016 no longer place items on the roof of the car and then forget about them until they drive away and hear something falling off the vehicle?

Today’s Slice question: Do you trust the handles glued onto paper grocery bags?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Please pass along your best excuse for not cleaning out the garage.