Posted 10/24/2006 05:18:00 PM by Douglas

For some reason, this is a lot more common than you'd think.

Three-year-old Robert Moore went fishing for a stuffed replica of Sponge Bob and ended up trapped in a vending machine. The toddler's adventure began with a Saturday evening shopping trip with his grandmother, Fredricka Bierdemann, and three siblings.

Bierdemann ended the trip by giving each child a dollar and telling them to have fun in a retailer's game room.

A stuffed Sponge Bob in a vending machine's bin caught Robert's eye. He tried without success to fish it out with a plastic crane.

"I told him I could get it for him," his grandmother said. "He's a character. He said, 'Oh no, I can get it.'"

When she turned her back to get another dollar for a second try, Robert took off his coat and squeezed through an opening in the machine. He landed in the stuffed animal cube.

"I turned around and looked for him, and he said, 'Oma, I'm in here," Bierdemann said. "I thought I would have a heart attack."

Store employees couldn't find a key to the machine, so Robert waited while the Antigo Fire Department was called.

Firemen, always with the firemen. Why do they get called out for crap like this? Are there no kittens in trees to rescue? I think there's a parallel to that old joke about how pointless it is to get firemen to rescue kittens from trees: How often do you see a cat skeleton in a tree? They got up there, they'll figure it out.

Same could be said for the coin operated crane game. I've never seen a kid skeleton in one of those things. Just leave 'em in there and let them figure out how to get out. And if someone comes by with a quarter and gets lucky fishing him out, more power to ya! That's just one more manure scooper for the dairy!

Is there some reasons two of these incidents happened in Wisconsin?