This morning In My Professional Capacity I had a fairly hairy one-on-one interview with an individual who oversees millions of dollars of public money. At the end of our discussion I got up, took a wrong step, did a “Three Stooges”-like dance around the room for what seemed to be 30 seconds, and ultimately landed in a heap on the floor. The individual whom I had interrogated kindly helped me up.
Oopsie.
Courtesy of Lennon/McCartney. Other than that, I got nuttin.
Ahh, I love it when the real pitfalls of humanity break through the veneer of “professionalism”.
Happens to us all. Well, everyone except maybe Jack Bauer.
Hope there were no injuries (beyond your pride.)
If your profession is clown or stuntman, this might be a good thing.
I once got a job as a restaurant hostess at TGI Fridays. I was a bit nervous on my first day, because I was a married lady with kids and all my co-workers were younger college students. Channeling Maria vonTrapp from The Sound of Music, I strode bravely into the kitchen, mentally singing “I Have Confidence”…
My cute little boots suddenly clutched at each other like frightened children, and I went splat on my face with the largest possible audience.
I never really liked that job…
You kwow when you step on something slippery and sort of, for lack of a better word, “skate” for one step? In high school I had a job bussing tables. I was carrying a bin of dishes and stepped on some wilted blob that used to maybe be piece of spinach or something. So with one step I covered about ten feet of distance, leaving a green skid-mark behind me on the painted concrete floor.
Good news: I didn’t fall and smash the dishes to bits.
Bad news: According to witness accounts, for the length of the slide, I let loose with an ear drum-liquefying, high-pitched scream—three octaves higher than any man with intact testes has ever been known to hit—bringing the entire bistro to a complete, gobsmacked standstill.
Julie Andrews stumbled during that song, too, and it was left in the movie. At least your fall wasn’t filmed.
It’s the song’s fault! :eek:
This is slaying me. 
Oh. I thought this was a thread about me.
Carry on.
Classy. I’ll have you know I have NEVER done that. Well, never that exact thing. I usually manage to keep my feet when I’m flailing around like that. 
That’s how I ski. I never fall down–haven’t fallen in years. But boy can I flail!
You can’t seriously be suggesting that it happens to Chuck Norris.
Some years ago I had a couple who wanted to add a second story to trheir house. I was sitting with them at their kitchen table and the wife asked me if I would like a beer. Well, warm day and all, and I have a policy against refusing free beer.
The beer in a can appeared, and I had a few swigs and put it down. Somehow in the next few minutes I managed to make a sweeping gesture with my arm and knocked the beer over, spilling about a half a can’s worth on the table and floor. Much embarrassed apologizing on my part, and assurances that Accidents Do Happen on theirs.
I left, still feeling I had made a card-carrying ass out of my self, and grateful that my clients were understanding and would not hold this disaster against me in our business relationship.
Fast forward a few days to our next meeting. (That music you hear is from Jaws, and we all know what that portends!) We sat down at the kitchen table again, and again a beer was offered. I hesitated, but decided there was little chance of a repeat performance. Da-dum! Da-dum!
Well, I did exactly what I was sure I would not do, and again mops and paper towels were pressed into service, and the embarrassment quotient rose to hitherto unknown heights.
As it turned out, we went on to have a good professional relationship and they got a good second story addition, but I seem to recall that beer was never offered to me again…
It was an in joke at the Theater Department when I was in college that none of us could walk without tripping. So of course some of us made a point of pretending to trip when entering a room, flailing our arms before “managing” to regain our balance. The more creative of us, space permitting, would conclude by doing a few dance steps.
Two incidents, one for me and one for my wife:
Incident the First: I was teaching a class several years ago and using one of those old fashioned, suit case sized projectors, one where the room had to be totally dark. As was my usual practice, I was pacing back and forth at the front of the room, expounding wisdom. My toe caught a power cord and I went down WHOOMP face first, no warning, no flailing of arms or anything. Just BANG, face first. I jumped up, said “Oops” and continued on, denying in my mind that anything at all had happened.
Incident the Second: My wife was having lunch with some new coworkers, people that she would have liked to impress. As they were leaving the restaraunt, my wife someone tripped on the curb, sprained her ankle, and went down like a cute wet bag of cement. She said that as she was going down, she yelled “Fuck!” and farted simultaneously. I would have immediately slit my throat in shame, but my wife is made of sterner stuff.
Hell no! Chuck Norris isn’t even human when he doesn’t want to be.
Oh, see that doesn’t work for everybody. A college roommate of mine took on a job in the warehouse of a major dairy company for the summer. There was some kind of massive shelving thing in what was described to me as a giant refrigerator or a refrigerated warehouse or something. Something on the shelving unit was sticking out and kept scraping the side of a cherry-picker, so his boss asked him to tap it back into place.
So my roommate found the only hammer-like thing he could find, a rubber mallet and whallopped the offending sticky-outy thing. The rubber mallet, as rubber things do, bounced and popped him on the nose. Apparently, he looked around to see if anyone noticed, wiped a bit of blood from his nose, and then continued working, pretending nothing had happened. No one would ever know!
His boss comes into the giant fridge a couple hours later and stares at roomie like this: :eek: Maybe the cold had numbed his senses a little, but roommate was totally unware that he basically looked like this.
That is fabulous. Few things on the internet genuinely make me laugh, but that really did.
I don’t tend to fall over a lot, but I do have a habit of sitting on tables while I’m teaching. My old classroom had those ancient slam-top desks, with inkwells and everything. And one with a loose hinge… on which I sat, and in getting up, heard a long, loud “rrrrrrip!”. I rapidly sat back down and remained seated while one of my students ran down to the Home Ec teacher for a needle and thread so that I could sew up the large and remarkably ill-placed tear in my trousers before my next class (while two other giggling students guarded the door so that no-one would come in while I was disrobed).
I also once sat down on an old garden chair with a big plate of barbecue food in one hand and a beer in the other. The chair collapsed into itself, and I was left folded in half with my arse on the floor and my arms and legs pointing straight up. Didn’t spill one bit of food or beer, though!
I laughed out loud at PoorYorick’s wife, too (mostly because I can imagine doing something like that - ask my husband about the time I accidentally flung the bananas in Safeway one evening).
My friend and I were at an outdoor concert in a park in Saskatoon one fine summer’s day. They were selling beer, and we watched one guy fall ass over teakettle down the short slope with four beers in his hands, and not spill a drop. It was a running joke with us that people from Saskatchewan know how to respect a beer.
