Shafted

      A thief broke into the Museum of Ancient Artifacts and stole a priceless figurine from the Trobriand Islands.  It was carved in cork 600 years ago, a beautiful sculpture of a bird.  He skipped all the masks from ancient Africa, the canoes from the far north, and grabbed this statuette simply because it was so small. 

      Unknown to him, of course, he set off a laser alarm and the guards soon chased him.  Somehow he managed to outrace them to the front doors and get outside, but they continued to pursue him. 

      A block away, seeing that he was on the verge of getting caught, he dropped the little statue into a hole and got away.  But that presented the problem, the kind that only a master of the obvious like myself could solve. 

      You see, the hole was actually the top of a pipe stuck in the ground for a drainage system that was never built.  It was thirty feet deep and only a foot in diameter but just wide enough to drop the cork statue into.  No doubt the statue was sitting at the bottom of the shaft but any attempt to drop some devise down to retrieve it would possibly have damaged it.                          

      The statue was stuck, the guards were stuck.  I was not.

      I saw the solution immediately and was able to solve the problem by making one simple call. 

      Who do you think I called?

Nano Solution_____________________________________________

      “Er...a troupe of trained mice?” you say witlessly, but even you know that you are stalling.

      “No, I called the fire department of course.”

      “Did they have teensy little ladders?”

      “They had a hose,” Nano says, ignoring your failure at humor, “which allowed them to gently pour water into the pipe, thus raising the cork statue, which rose as the water did.”