Holiday or not, N. Barba had laundry to do.
The hairdresser had two boys, ages 4 and 12, and some time to kill before Friendsgiving brunch.
So on a chilly Thanksgiving morning, on Nov. 28, 1996, she lugged her laundry down to the basement of her West Philadelphia apartment building and loaded up the washer.
But she forgot one thing: The dryer she wanted to use wasn’t working.
Too late.
She had already plugged a quarter into the dryer’s coin slot.
Using the ring finger on her left hand, she tried to poke the bottom of the slot to get back her 25-cent piece.
And then her finger got stuck.
Barba started to cry.
“This felt like, to her, one more thing in a long line of things that were just not going great,” Inquirer reporter Al Lubrano, who wrote the original story, said recently.
For two hours she stood in that thankless and cold laundry room, fending off pins-and-needles sensations in her hand and worrying about her boys being alone in their apartment, before a neighbor found her.
The neighbor brought a chair for Barba to stand on — to help release some of the pressure on her hand — and then called for help.
Cell phones were not yet a thing, but another neighbor kindly brought down a portable phone so Barba could call and reassure her sons.
Firefighters swooped in and cut the coin box off the machine. The machine’s operator was then called into action, and he showed up to separate the coin slot from the coin box.
“She was little bit surprised when the firefighters came and it wasn’t the end of it,” Lubrano recalled.
Her now-swollen finger needed a few dollops of petroleum jelly before slipping out of the coin slot. She did not report any permanent damage.
Lubrano asked Barba back in ’96 to sum up the whole ordeal in one word.
“Annoying,” she said.
“Like a true mom,” Lubrano said recently, “she sort of minimized it.”
And after all that, Barba went back downstairs later that night in ’96 and threw in another load of laundry — using a different dryer.
“I’m grateful to my neighbors,” Barba said, “but I missed my brunch.”