Blenders, Chainsaws and Criminals

I know what you’re thinking, what do those three things have to do with each other?

If I’ve shared some of my more random criminal law practice questions for the bar exam with you, you might think this post has something to do with that. It doesn’t.

No, this post is inspired by real events…

We recently purchased a blender and we were making lots of cool smoothies with it. Tonya is the smoothie queen–she’s always gets to the perfect blend, complete with fruits and vegetables and so on. Good brain food for Natalie, and tasty for us. But then something happened.

At one point, in the middle of the night after we’d gone to bed, the blender just turned on for no reason at all. I first remember hearing the blender in the back of my subconscious, to me it sounded like a chainsaw, but I was quickly taken from my dream state by Tonya’s ear splitting scream. Seriously, the covers literally flew off the bed as we jumped up and the blender continued to, well, blend for a few more seconds. And then it died down.

You know that unnerving and scary feeling you get. The one that’s like, I don’t know how this is supposed to work when somebody breaks into my house. We had that feeling in spades.

We creeped into our pitch black hallway and flipped on the light switch.

“Hello!” I called out into the kitchen.

We seriously thought someone had to be in there because blenders don’t normally turn on entirely by themselves. We edged forward a few feet more and I picked up this long wooden statue of a shepherd this member in our brach gave us. It’s about 3 feet long and it has a very sturdy base that’s perfect for inflicting blunt force trauma. I’m not a violent person, but when a stranger enters your house and turns on your blender and scares your family, well…

We finally made it to the kitchen and turned on the lights. Nobody in sight. We quickly went from room to room turning on all of our lights, even going into Natalie’s room and waking her up just to make sure she was safe. We checked behind the shower curtain and in all of our cabinets just to be sure (I guess we thought our intruder could have been some kind of midget).

Anyway, after checking to make sure there was no one in the house, we unplugged the blender and separated the top from the base. Tonya went back to bed pretty quickly but I just couldn’t sleep for whatever reason. I stayed up and asked google if it had ever heard of blenders turning on by themselves. I read about everything from ghost stories to weird electronic surges.

Finally I got tired enough to go back to sleep, and as I drifted off, the question finally occurred to me, “What kind of criminal breaks into your house just to turn on the blender…?”