Our family took shelter in the basement after hearing a tornado warning. My husband told everyone to stay put while he got his cell phone out of the car, in case the lines went dead. He didn't return for the longest time, so I went looking for him. I was upstairs calling his name, when I heard our phone machine click on. "Hi," a voice said. "This is Dad. I'm locked out of the house."    --Laure Jorges

I spent an afternoon helping my boyfriend move into a new home. In one carton I found a crockpot, with an odd-looking and very dirty metal lid. Later I ushered my boyfriend into the kitchen and asked why he hadn't mentioned this perfectly good pot.He stared at it, then replied, "Well, after I broke the lid I never thought of replacing it with a hubcap."    --Caroline C. Jones

My co-worker and I were making a sales call to a rural Baptist church. We gave our presentation to the church committee, and then the group's chairman walked to the altar and knelt down. After about a minute of silent prayer, he returned and announced in a solemn tone, "The Lord tells me we should wait." My colleague responded by walking to the altar and kneeling down himself. Then he returned to the group, looked at the chairman, and declared, "He wants to talk with you again."    --Harold Lamb

I'm a deputy sheriff and was parked near a motel, running radar checks, when a man approached my vehicle and asked for help. He complained that the volume on the television in the empty motel room next to his was so loud that he and his wife couldn't sleep.  No one was in the motel office. The man's wife was outside when I reached their door. That's when I got my idea. I asked her for their remote control, aimed it through the window of the empty room, and turned off the blaring TV.     --Ray Allen

Having avoided the scale for a few years, my husband finally got up the nerve to climb aboard. Unable to read the numbers, he got off to grab his eyeglasses and stepped back on. "What do you know?" he called out. "These glasses weigh 50 pounds." --Erma Timpson

At a planning meeting at my college, I congratulated a colleague on producing some superb student-guidance notes explaining how to combat plagiarism. "How long did it take you to write them?" I asked. "Not long," he said. "I copied them from another university's website." --Bob Wheeler

A few weeks? after the death of my father-in-law, I found my seven-year-old son crying in bed. His grandmother had died the previous year, and he was taking it all very hard. "You know, Kyle," I said, "when we die, we'll get to see Grandma and Grandpa again in heaven." With tears spilling down his face, Kyle cried, "That's easy for you to say. You don't have that long!" --Farrel Chapman