If you know me in real life, you will know that I am far from being the most gracious person on the planet. I trip over my own feet, I walk into automatic sliding doors, I drop things and I break them. I almost always have bruises on my arms and legs because hard objects keep on getting in my way. However, this post is not about me and my clumsiness. It is about someone else’s misfortune…

A couple of days ago, I was strolling leisurely up the library stairs when a girl came flying down (quite literally) and her scream travelled all the way from the top of the stairs to the bottom. (She slipped on a puddle of water apparently.) On her way down, she instinctively reached out in a feeble attempt to grab at anything that could potentially stop her fall, and as luck would have it, I was the stopping tool. Unfortunately, instead of grabbing onto something soft and cuddly, she crashed into my hard and pointy umbrella. Needless to say, my umbrella didn’t handle the impact so well. As white knights rushed to her side, I couldn’t help but stare at my poor umbrella which, by that stage, was lying bent at a 30 degree angle. I almost wanted to shout “Hey, you broke my umbrella!” but I figured the poor girl had suffered enough humiliation already; drawing further attention to the fact that she single-handedly chop-sueyed my umbrella would be rather cruel.

I brushed off the incident and continued to make my way to the library. A couple of minutes later, a throbbing pain in my index finger called for my attention. To my horror, the middle joint was swollen and the patch of redness had started taking on a purple hue. The silly girl must have bumped my finger and I was too worried about the umbrella to notice. Luckily I was still able to write my objective test – incapacitated finger and all. I even managed to fix my umbrella (by standing on it)! Who knew they would be so flexible?

Moral of the story? Wear proper shoes! Falling is so last century.