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Examples: [Cerf, 1970]A carpet layer had just put the finishing touches to a big wall-to-wall job. It had taken all day. Now, as he stepped back to admire his handiwork, he was horrified to notice a small lump right in the middle of the room. In a flash, he realized what had happened. His pack of cigarettes was in none of his pockets. Not one to panic, he made sure nobody was watching, then picked up his hammer and pounded on the lump until the carpet was level. Pleased with himself, he went into the kitchen for his tool kit — and there on the table was his pack of cigarettes.Just then a little boy's voice was heard upstairs: Mommy, where's the cat?[Brunvand, 1987]A few years ago, one of my students told me that a co-worker of his father's, who sells and installs carpeting, supposedly had just finished a big wall-to-wall carpet installation. He was gathering up his tools to go to the next job when he spotted a small but obvious lump right in the center of the new carpet.Not wanting to tear up the finished job for such a minor defect, the man took a hammer and pounded the lump down flat, finishing the job by stepping on it a few times. The next day, however, the lady for whom he did the job called him and asked if he had happened to see her pet canary while he was working in her house.[Collected on the Internet, 1999]I've heard the story about the handyman that came to lay carpet in a house. The family let him in and he worked all day with the carpet and was done before the family returned. When he was done he reached for his cigarettes only to see that his pocket was empty. He searched everywhere and finally noticed a bulge under the carpet. Thinking that the bulge was his pack of cigarettes he immediately took a hammer and pounded the bulge flat. That evening the family called the handyman and complimented him on a job well done. They told him that they found his cigarettes on the table, no other family member smoked, and asked him he had seen the family's hamster that had escaped from its cage that very same day. Variations:The flattened animal can be any of a number of common household pets, with cats, hamsters, mice, gerbils, parrots, budgies, and canaries being the critters most usually mistaken for a package of cigarettes.Sometimes the workman has no idea what the mysterious lump might be, but in most tellings the installer figures the bump to be his smokes. In either case, he taps down the rise in the carpet without thinking. Origins: earliest known print version of this tale about a flattened furry friend appeared in a 1964 Reader's Digest. Since those early beginnings, pounded-out pets have turned up under newly-laid carpets with surprising regularity, at least according to joke books, urban legend collections, and e-mail circulated through the Internet. We might think of this legend as a humorous updating of the look before you leap maxim, sharing acommon ending with The Pocket(ed) Watch and The Jogger's Billfold, wherein the perpetrator realizes his mistake upon finding a lost object in a perfectly ordinary place. Barbara marl burrowed Mikkelson
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