Here is one of my Stupid Self-Inflicted Injuries:
I was in my upstairs office/studio with my faithful Airedale Toshie at my side. We were standing at a very tall filing cabinet, and I flung the top drawer shut & we stepped out into the hallway. Mere seconds later, there was a horrible crash directly behind us because half the plaster ceiling in my office fell down. Huge mess. 100 year old dust, soot, thick chunks of plaster everywhere. After getting over the shock & intense relief of a near miss, I began to worry about my husband’s reaction when he came home from work later that day. He’d been incredibly annoyed when gallons of water & a huge portion of kitchen ceiling had fallen the first time he showered in this house, several months earlier.
I thought my husband would feel a lot better if I began cleaning up the worst of the mess & moving things out of the room, —before he saw the gaping hole into the attic, etc. So.
I figured the filing cabinet would be best used on the first floor. I removed all the drawers. Then I tried to move the empty cabinet —but it was really bulky, still heavy even empty, & had sharp metal edges on the inside openings. I only got it as far down as 3 steps where it blocked a stair landing & I still had 10 vertical feet left to go. Every time I tried to move it, it made booming, echoing noises which upset my dog.
That’s when I got my brilliant idea.
The cabinet was only several inches shorter than me. I could slither into it through one of the drawer openings, then stand up inside & carefully walk it down the stairs.
Hooray!
BTW, these rowhouse stairs were enclosed, narrow, and had very shallow steps and very high risers. These stairs terrified my mother-in-law and a couple of my friends (wimps!). My m-i-l would often freeze, sit down on an upper step and refuse to budge unless led down slowly by her son. The only bathroom in the house was on the 2nd floor so until they stopped visiting, some of my girlfriends would descend the stairs by scooting on their bottoms, one step at a time.
Anyway, I was inside the filing cabinet, poised at the top of the stairs, I remember thinking “this isn’t so bad.” Meanwhile Toshie was frantic, poor boy. I took each step very carefully and everything was going great until midway down when I stepped on a loose tread edge and caught the back bottom cabinet edge on an upper step, teetered, then pitched forward & hurtled to the bottom with such force that the cabinet, and me, were wedged at an angle between the wood door at the bottom and the stairs. It fell so hard that the top edge of the metal cabinet gouged a deep divot in the wood door, which only served to grip the cabinet even tighter.
You know how they say your life plays before your eyes during near death events such as this? No, that didn’t happen. Instead, I saw the future. I saw Death, Panic, pain & severe manglement. I saw my husband arriving home to Toshie’s mournful howls, utterly mystified to discover my bloody, lifeless body encased in a metal file box, blocking the way to the kitchen.
I did panic because there seemed to be no way to get out of the damned filing cabinet. Gravity worked against me, so did all the sharp edges on the inside of the drawer openings and the drawer slides. It took a LOT longer to get out than it did to get in.
I was covered in cuts & bruises and wrenched my back and neck. The worst thing though, after getting out & licking my wounds, was that I couldn’t hide the evidence. I absolutely could not unjam that cabinet by myself. It had to stay there until my husband came home & then I had to explain the idiotic thing that I did. I will never forget the expression on his face as I told him, or on my dog’s face as I was falling. Poor babies, I scared them both sh*tless.
