Jokes for Relaxing.. [new thread]

[Toastmaster]

If AOL was a City
1.You'd live in a place where no two people had the same name.

2.You'd only pay $21.95 a month to live there, but half the time you tried to leave your house, the door would be stuck.

3.Once you got outside, even if you were in a hurry, you'd be assaulted by slimy little door-to-door sales creeps offering you great AOL 14.4 modems for only $399.99.

4.The commute to work is just a double-click away, but every time you try to leave your driveway, the flow of traffic knocks you back into your yard.

5.The local post office would tell your mother you're not a known resident.

6.The local post office won't forward your mail to you when you move.

7.If you saw a crime and called 911, they'd reply a week later with a form letter saying how you "really are important to us."

8.Every time you went shopping, you'd be kicked out of the store by a bouncer screaming, "We're Sorry, This Store is Temporarily Unavailable"

9.Whenever you traveled to other cities, people would see your license tag and laugh at you, behind your back.

10.You'd occasionally be sent home during your day by another bouncer telling you that the city has performed an illegal operation.

11.You'd not have any idea who your neighbors are, and most new arrivals would move in at night, stuff everyone's mailbox with garbage, and vacate before sun-up.

12.The administration would build a huge, state of the art park, and allow the kids to play there free, then suddenly start demanding money.

[Toastmaster]

Toasters
If Oracle made toasters... They'd claim their toaster was compatible with all brands and styles of bread, but when you got it home you'd discover the Bagel Engine was still in development, the Croissant Extension was three years away, and that indeed the whole appliance was just blowing smoke.

If Hewlett-Packard made toasters... They would market the Reverse Toaster, which takes in toast and gives you regular bread.

If IBM made toasters... They would want one big toaster where people bring bread to be submitted for overnight toasting. IBM would claim a worldwide market for five, maybe six toasters.

If Xerox made toasters... You could toast one-sided or double-sided. Successive slices would get lighter and lighter. The toaster would jam your bread for you.

If Radio Shack made toasters... The staff would sell you a toaster, but not know anything about it. Or you could buy all the parts to build your own toaster.

If Thinking Machines made toasters... You would be able to toast 64,000 pieces of bread at the same time.

If Cray made toasters... They would cost $16 million but would be faster than any other single-slice toaster in the world.

If The Rand Corporation made toasters... It would be a large, perfectly smooth and seamless black cube. Every morning there would be a piece of toast on top of it. Their service department would have an unlisted phone number, and the blueprints for the box would be highly classified government documents. The X-Files would have an episode about it.

If the NSA made toasters... Your toaster would have a secret trap door that only the NSA could access in case they needed to get at your toast for reasons of national security.

If Sony made toasters... The ToastMan, which would be barely larger than the single piece of bread it is meant to toast, can be conveniently attached to your belt.

If Timex made toasters... They would be cheap and small quartz-crystal wrist toasters that take a licking and keep on toasting.

If Fisher Price made toasters... 'Baby's First Toaster' would have a hand-crank that you turn to toast the bread that pops up like a Jack-in-the-box.

If Microsoft made toasters... Every time you bought a loaf of bread, you would have to buy a toaster. You wouldn't have to take the toaster, but you'd still have to pay for it anyway. Toaster'95 wouldweigh 15000 pounds (requiring a reinforced steel countertop), draw enough electricity to power a small city, take up 95% of the space in your kitchen, would claim to be the first toaster that lets you control how light or dark you want your toast to be, and would secretly interrogate your other appliances to find out who made them. Everyone would hate Microsoft toasters, but nonetheless would buy them since most of the good bread only works with their toasters.

If Apple made toasters... It would do everything the Microsoft toaster does, but 5 years earlier.

[Toastmaster]

Computer Gender
As you are aware, ships have long been characterized as being female (for example, "Steady as she goes" or "She's listing to starboard, Captain!").

Recently, a group of computer scientists (all males) announced that computers should also be referred to as being female. Their top five reasons for drawing this conclusion were:

1.No one but the Creator understands their internal logic.

2.The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.

3.The message "Bad command or file name" is about as informative as, "If you don't know why I'm mad at you, then I'm certainly not going to tell you."

4.Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.

5.As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

However, another group of computer scientists (all female) think that computers should be referred to as if they were male. Their top five reasons were:

1.They have a lot of data, but are still clueless.

2.They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem.

3.As soon as you commit to one you realize that, if you had waited a little longer, you could have obtained a better model.

4.In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.

5.Big power surges knock them out for the rest of the night.

[Toastmaster]

Email Mistakes
It's wise to remember how easily email -- this wonderful technology -- can be misused, sometimes unintentionally, with serious consequences.

Consider the case of the Illinois man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick email.

Unfortunately, when typing her address, he missed one letter, and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher's wife whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her email, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint.

At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:

"Dearest Wife, Just got checked in. Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow. P.S. Sure is hot down here."

[Toastmaster]

Glossary of PC Messages
It says: "Press Any Key" It means: "Press any key you like but I'm not moving."

It says: "Press A Key" (This one's a programmers joke. Nothing happens unless you press the "A" key.)

It says: "Fatal Error. Please contact technical support quoting error no. 1A4-2546512430E" It means: "... where you will be kept on hold for 10 minutes, only to be told that it's a hardware problem."

It says: "Installing program to C:<Directory>...." It means: "... And I'll also be writing a few files into c:windows and c:windowsystem where you'll NEVER find them."

It says: "Please insert disk 11" It means: "Because I know darn well there are only 10 disks."

It says: "Cannot read from drive D:...." It means: "... However, if you put the CD in right side up..."

It says: "Please Wait...." It means: "... Indefinitely."

It says: "Directory does not exist...." It means: ".... any more. Whoops."

It says: "The application caused an error. Choose Ignore or Close." It means: "....Makes no difference to me, you're still not getting your work back."

[Toastmaster]

Ariane 5
This TRUE story is very interesting if you are a Software Developer or a Quality Assurance person. Still interesting to those of you who are not...

Incredible software quality story.

It took the European Space Agency 10 years and $7 billion to produce Ariane 5, a giant rocket capable of hurling a pair of three-ton satellites into orbit with each launch and intended to give Europe overwhelming supremacy in the commercial space business.

All it took to explode that rocket less than a minute into its maiden voyage last June, scattering fiery rubble across the mangrove swamps of French Guiana, was a small computer program trying to stuff a 64-bit number into a 16-bit space.

One bug, one crash. Of all the careless lines of code recorded in the annals of computer science, this one may stand as the most devastatingly efficient. From interviews with rocketry experts and an analysis prepared for the space agency, a clear path from an arithmetic error to total destruction emerges.

To play the tape backward: At 39 seconds after launch, as the rocket reached an altitude of two and a half miles, a self-destruct mechanism finished off Ariane 5, along with its payload of four expensive and uninsured scientific satellites. Self-destruction was triggered automatically because aerodynamic forces were ripping the boosters from the rocket.

This disintegration had begun instantaneously when the spacecraft swerved off course under the pressure of the three powerful nozzles in its boosters and main engine. The rocket was making an abrupt course correction that was not needed, compensating for a wrong turn that had not taken place.

Steering was controlled by the on-board computer, which mistakenly thought the rocket needed a course change because of numbers coming from the inertial guidance system. That device uses gyroscopes and accelerometers to track motion. The numbers looked like flight data -- bizarre and impossible flight data -- but were actually a diagnostic error message. The guidance system had in fact shut down. This shutdown occurred 36.7 seconds after launch, when the guidance system's own computer tried to convert one piece of data -- the sideways velocity of the rocket -- from a 64-bit format to a 16-bit format. The number was too big, and an overflow error resulted.

When the guidance system shut down, it passed control to an identical, redundant unit, which was there to provide backup in case of just such a failure. But the second unit had failed in the identical manner a few milliseconds before. It was running the same software.

This bug belongs to a species that has existed since the first computer programmers realized they could store numbers as sequences of bits, atoms of data, ones and zeroes: 1001010001101001. . . . A bug like this might crash a spreadsheet or word processor on a bad day.

Ordinarily, though, when a program converts data from one form to another, the conversions are protected by extra lines of code that watch for errors and recover gracefully. Indeed, many of the data conversions in the guidance system's programming included such protection.

But in this case, the programmers had decided that this particular velocity figure would never be large enough to cause trouble. After all, it never had been before. Unluckily, Ariane 5 was a faster rocket than Ariane 4. One extra absurdity: the calculation containing the bug, which shut down the guidance system, which confused the on-board computer, which forced the rocket off course, actually served no purpose once the rocket was in the air. Its only function was to align the system before launch. So it should have been turned off. But engineers chose long ago, in an earlier version of the Ariane, to leave this function running for the first 40 seconds of flight - -- a "special feature" meant to make it easy to restart the system in the event of a brief hold in the countdown.

The Europeans hope to launch a new Ariane 5 next spring, this time with a newly designated "software architect" who will oversee a process of more intensive and, they hope, realistic ground simulation.

Simulation is the great hope of software debuggers everywhere, though it can never anticipate every feature of real life. "Very tiny details can have terrible consequences," says Jacques Durand, head of the project, in Paris. "That's not surprising, especially in a complex software system such as this is."

These days, we have complex software systems everywhere. We have them in our dishwashers and in our wristwatches, though they're not quite so mission-critical. We have computers in our cars -- from 15 to 50 microprocessors, depending how you count: in the engine, the transmission, the suspensions, the steering, the brakes and every other major subsystem. Each runs its own software, thoroughly tested, simulated and debugged, no doubt.

Bill Powers, vice president for research at Ford, says that cars' computing power is increasingly devoted not just to actual control but to diagnostics and contingency planning -- "Should I abort the mission, and if I abort, where would I go?" he says. "We also have what's called a limp-home strategy." That is, in the worst case, the car is supposed to behave more or less normally, like a car of the pre-computer era, instead of, say, taking it upon itself to swerve into the nearest tree.

The European investigators chose not to single out any particular contractor or department for blame. "A decision was taken," they wrote. "It was not analyzed or fully understood." And "the possible implications of allowing it to continue to function during flight were not realized." They did not attempt to calculate how much time or money was saved by omitting the standard error-protection code.

"The board wishes to point out," they added, with the magnificent blandness of many official accident reports, "that software is an expression of a highly detailed design and does not fail in the same sense as a mechanical system." No. It fails in a different sense. Software built up over years from millions of lines of code, branching and unfolding and intertwining, comes to behave more like an organism than a machine.

"There is no life today without software," says Frank Lanza, an executive vice president of the American rocket maker Lockheed Martin. "The world would probably just collapse." Fortunately, he points out, really important software has a reliability of 99.9999999 percent. At least, until it doesn't.

[Toastmaster]

Bill Gates in Heaven
Bill Gates died and, much to everyone's surprise, went to Heaven. When he got there, he had to wait in the reception area.

Heaven's reception area was the size of Massachusetts. There were literally millions of people milling about, living in tents with nothing to do all day. Food and water were being distributed from the backs of trucks, while staffers with clipboards slowly worked their way through the crowd. Booze and drugs were being passed around. Fights were commonplace. Sanitation conditions were appalling. All in all, the scene looked like Woodstock gone metastatic.

Bill lived in a tent for three weeks until, finally, one of the staffers approached him. The staffer was a young man in his late teens, face scarred with acne. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with the words TEAM PETER emblazoned on it in large yellow lettering.

"Hello," said the staffer in a bored voice that could have been the voice of any clerk in any overgrown bureaucracy. "My name is Gabriel and I'll be your induction coordinator." Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, I'm not the Archangel Gabriel. I'm just a guy from Philadelphia named Gabriel who died in a car wreck at the age of 17. Now give me your name, last name first, unless you were Chinese in which case it's first name first."

"Gates, Bill." Gabriel started searching though the sheaf of papers on his clipboard, looking for Bill's Record of Earthly Works. "What's going on here?" asked Bill. "Why are all these people here? Where's Saint Peter? Where are the Pearly Gates?"

Gabriel ignored the questions until he located Bill's records. Then Gabriel looked up in surprise. "It says here that you were the president of a large software company. Is that right?"

"Yes."

"Well then, do the math chip-head! When this Saint Peter business started, it was an easy gig. Only a hundred or so people died every day, and Peter could handle it all by himself, no problem. But now there are over five billion people on earth. Jesus, when God said to 'go forth and multiply,' he didn't say 'like rabbits!' With that large a population, ten thousand people die every hour. Over a quarter-million people a day. Do you think Peter can meet them all personally?"

"I guess not."

"You guess right. So Peter had to franchise the operation. Now, Peter is the CEO of Team Peter Enterprises, Inc. He just sits in the corporate headquarters and sets policy. Franchisees like me handle the actual inductions." Gabriel looked though his paperwork some more, and then continued. "Your paperwork seems to be in order. And with a background like yours, you'll be getting a plum job assignment."

"Job assignment?"

"Of course. Did you expect to spend the rest of eternity sitting on your ass and drinking ambrosia? Heaven is a big operation. You have to pull your weight around here!" Gabriel took out a triplicate form, had Bill sign at the bottom, and then tore out the middle copy and handed it to Bill. "Take this down to induction center #23 and meet up with your occupational orientator. His name is Abraham." Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, he's not that Abraham."

Bill walked down a muddy trail for ten miles until he came to induction center #23. He met with Abraham after a mere six-hour wait.

"Heaven is centuries behind in building its data processing infrastructure," explained Abraham. "As you've seen, we're still doing everything on paper. It takes us a week just to process new entries."

"I had to wait three weeks," said Bill. Abraham stared at Bill angrily, and Bill realized that he'd made a mistake. Even in Heaven, it's best not to contradict a bureaucrat. "Well," Bill offered, "maybe that Bosnia thing has you guys backed up."

Abraham's look of anger faded to mere annoyance. "Your job will be to supervise Heaven's new data processing center. We're building the largest computing facility in creation. Half a million computers connected by a multi-segment fiber optic network, all running into a back-end server network with a thousand CPUs on a gigabit channel. Fully fault tolerant. Fully distributed processing. The works."

Bill could barely contain his excitement. "Wow! What a great job! This is really Heaven!"

"We're just finishing construction, and we'll be starting operations soon. Would you like to go see the center now?"

"You bet!"

Abraham and Bill caught the shuttle bus and went to Heaven's new data processing center. It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times bigger than the Astrodome. Workmen were crawling all over the place, getting the miles of fiber optic cables properly installed. But the center was dominated by the computers. Half a million computers, arranged neatly row-by-row, half a million ....

.... Macintoshes ....

.... all running Claris software! Not a PC in sight! Not a single byte of Microsoft code!

The thought of spending the rest of eternity using products that he had spent his whole life working to destroy was too much for Bill. "What about PCs???" he exclaimed. "What about Windows??? What about Excel??? What about Word???"

"You're forgetting something," said Abraham.

"What's that?" asked Bill plaintively.

"This is Heaven," explained Abraham. "We need a computer system that's heavenly to use. If you want to build a data processing center based on PCs running Windows, then ....

.... GO TO HELL!"

NOTE: This CERTAINLY does not represent the views of Steven Willoughby who, although he does not terribly care for Bill Gates, likes Macs even less.

[seesaw]

Tom, a traveling salesman once got caught up in a blizzard and got shelter with a farmer who had three daughters.

The farmer called him aside and told him, "Young man, I have three daughters, so stay in your room the whole night and no tricks, be warned."

In the morning, Tom, the salesman came down and the farmer asked him, "How was your night, young man?"

"Oh! Slept like a rabbit. Thanks for your hospitality; I will never forget it."

The farmer felt very happy and at the bar that night mentioned this fact to his close friend.

He was boasting what a good father he had been by keeping his daughters away from trouble.

His friend laughed aloud and said, "You fool! A rabbit does not sleep at night. It goes from hole to hole the whole night!"

[seesaw]

A Doctor was addressing a large audience in Tampa.

"The material we put into our stomachs is enough to have killed most of us sitting here, years ago. This includes:

- Red meat is awful.

- Soft drinks corrode your stomach lining.

- Chinese food is loaded with MSG.

- High fat diets can be disastrous.

- Long-term harm caused by the germs in our drinking water.

But there is one thing that is the most dangerous of all and we all have, or will, eat it. Can anyone here tell me what food it is that causes the most grief and suffering for years after eating it?"

After several seconds of quiet, a 75-year-old man in the front row raised his hand, and softly said, "Wedding Cake."

[seesaw]

On a trip to the USA, a wealthy Arab fell in love with Susan. He begged her to marry him, but she refused, saying that she had no intention of leaving America to live in a desert.

Immediately, the Arab bought several grand homes across the USA, from New England to California, and he took Susan on a tour of the homes, flying her from place to place in his private jet.

Susan was impressed, and she agreed to marry him.

Six weeks later, in tears, she phoned her father and asked him to take her back home.

"Whatever for?" asked her father.

"I've married a pervert," she cried.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said. "Just come and take me home."

So her father drove to her New England home. Arriving there, richly ornate gold gates opened electronically, and he drove along a wide, straight drive lined with oaks and maples. And at the end of the mile-long drive was a building so grand that it made the White House look like a dog kennel.

He climbed the solid marble steps to huge doors, at least twelve feet tall, and there he met his daughter, waiting for him with her two bags packed and ready to go.

"Oh, father," she cried. "Take me away from here at once. I cannot bear to stay a moment longer."

Her father could not believe that she should want to leave such splendor.

"What's wrong, dear?" he asked.

"The man is a pervert!" she exclaimed.

He asked his daughter to explain this perversion that was upsetting her so.

"When I married him," she sobbed, my ass-hole was as tight as a penny piece, and now, it's as big as a half dollar."

"Nay," said her father. "Surely you're not going to leave all this for the sake of forty-nine cents!"

[seesaw]

Classy things to say when stressed

1. "Okay, okay! I take it back. Unfuck you!!!"

2. "You say I'm a bitch like it's a bad thing?!"

3. "How many times do I have to flush before you go away?"

4. "This day sure was a total waste of make-up"

5. "Well, aren't we a bloody ray of sunshine?"

6. "Don't bother me, I'm living happily ever after."

7. "Do I look like a fucking people person!"

8. "This isn't an office. It's HELL with fluorescent lighting"

9. "I started out with nothing still have most of it left"

10. "I pretend to work, they pretend to pay me"

11. "Whatever kind of look you were going for, you missed"

12. "Do they ever shut up on your planet?"

13. "I'm not your type. I'm not inflatable"

14. "Don't worry. I forgot your name too."

15. "I just want revenge. Is that so wrong?"

16. "Not all men are annoying. Some are dead."

17. "Wait...I'm trying to imagine you with a personality"

18. "Ambivalent? Well yes and no."

19. "You look like shit. Is that the style now?"

20. "A hard-on doesn't count as personal growth."

21. "If assholes could fly, this place would be an airport.

[birdie8819]

Damn Good Definitions

ADULTERY - The wrong people doing the right thing.

ALIMONY - The screwing you get for the screwing you got.

BABY - A hollow tube with a loud voice at one end and a complete lack of responsibility at the other end.

CANNIBAL - One who is apt to pass his best friend.

CHIVALRY - A mans inclination to defend a woman against every man but himself.

CONSCIENCE - That which hurts when everything else feels so good.

CONSTIPATION - To have and to hold.

COOKIE - A virgin doughnut.

DANCE - A Naval engagement without the loss of seamen.

DIVORCE - What happens when two people cannot stomach each other any longer.

DECOY - A flashlight in the pants pocket.

DIARY - Book of revelations.

DOCTOR - A lucky fellow who is privileged to undress women and go all over them without getting his face slapped.

ENEMA - A goose with a gush.

EXPLORATION - Beating around the bush.

FATHER'S DAY - Nine months before labor day.

GENTLEMAN - One who is always careful to rest at least half his weight on his elbows.

GIGGALO - The egg that laid the golden Goose.

GLAMOUR GIRL - a much publicized young thing who is full of oomf, and frequently full of other things; one who doesn't worry about the meat shortage.

HORSE SHOW - A lot of horses showing their asses to a lot of horses' asses showing their horses.

HUSBAND - What is left after the nerve has been killed.

KEPT WOMAN - One who wears mink all day and fox all night.

HUNG CHOW - Chinese constipation.

A KISS - Upper persuasion for lower invasion; upstairs shopping for downstairs merchandise.

MASTURBATION - A solo played on a private organ.

METALLURGIST - A man who can look at a platinum blonde and tell whether she is virgin metal or a common ore.

MINUTE MAN - One who double parks while he visits a sporting house.

MORNING - The time of day when the rising generation retires, and the retiring generation arises.

MOTHER'S DAY - Nine months after fathers day.

DONKEY BARBECUE- Where everybody gets a piece of ass.

NUN - A woman who ain't never had none, don't want none, and ain't going to get none.

NURSE - A pan handler.

NURSERY - A place to park last years fun until it grows up a bit.

PAPOOSE - Consolation prize for taking a chance on an Indian blanket.

PIMP - A crack salesman; a nookie bookie.

PREGNANCY - When a woman is all swelled up from her mate's handiwork.

RHUMBA - An asset to music.

SECRETARY - A stenographer who watches her periods.

SIN - Anything the other fellow enjoys and you don't.

SISSY - A man who gets out of the bath tub to take a leak.

SPRING FEVER - When the iron in your blood turns to lead in your pencil.

STORK - The bird that had none of the fun in bringing the babies.

TAXIDERMIST - A man who mounts animals.

TOMCAT - A ball bearing mouse trap.

TRIPLETS - Having to take seriously what was poked at you in fun.

VISE - Anything you enjoy that is bad for you.

VIRGINITY - A bubble on the stream of life, one prick and it's gone forever.

VIRGIN WOOL - Wool from a sheep that can outrun a sheep herder.

[birdie8819]

DATING DICTIONARY

ATTRACTION - the act of associating horniness with a particular person.

LOVE AT 1st SIGHT - what occurs when two extremely horny, but not entirely choosy people meet.

DATING - the process of spending enormous amounts of money, time, and energy to get better acquainted with a person whom you don't especially like in the present and will learn to like a lot less in the future.

BIRTH CONTROL - avoiding pregnancy through such tactics as swallowing special pills, inserting a diaphragm, using a condom, dating repulsive men or spending time around children.

EASY - a term used to describe a woman who has the sexual morals of a man.

PRIG - a term used to describe a woman who wants to stay virgin until married.

EYE CONTACT - a method utilized by a single woman to communicate to a man that she is interested in him. Despite being advised to do so, many woman have difficulty looking a man directly in the eyes, not necessarily due to the shyness, but usually due to the fact that a woman's eyes are not located in her chest.

FRIEND - a member of the opposite sex in your acquaintance who has some flaw which makes sleeping with him/her totally unappealing.

INDIFFERENCE - a woman's feeling towards a man, which is interpreted by the man as "playing hard to get."

INTERESTING - a word a man uses to describe a woman who lets him do all the talking.

IRRITATING HABIT - what the endearing little qualities that initially attract two people to each other turn into after a few months together.

LAW OF RELATIVITY - how attractive a given person appears to be is directly proportional to how unattractive your date is.

NYMPHOMANIAC - a man's term for a woman who wants to have sex more often than he does.

FRIGID - a man's term for a woman who wants to have sex less often than he does, or who requires more foreplay than lifting her nightgown.

SOBER - condition in which it is almost impossible to fall in love.

NAG - a man's term for a woman who wants more to her life with him than just intercourse

[birdie8819]

Try This - (Remember to turn on your speaker)

World's Most Dangerous Creature

A Great White Cartoon . . . Touch the Picture

http://www.toilette-humor.com/cartoon.html

[soundlab]

Twelve priests were about to be ordained. The final test was for them to
line up in a straight row, totally nude, in a garden while a sexy and
beautiful, big breasted, nude model danced before them.
Each priest had a small bell attached to his weenie and they were told that
anyone whose bell rang when she danced in front of them would not be
ordained because he had not reached a state of spiritual purity.

The beautiful model danced before the first candidate, with no reaction. She
proceeded down the line with the same response from all the priests until
she got to the final priest, Carlos.

As she danced, his bell began to ring so loudly that it flew off and fell
clattering to the ground.

Embarrassed, Carlos took a few steps forward and bent over to pick it up.
Then all the other bells began to ring.