One day working at the tutoring center I was talking with some parents when little did I know their six-year old daughter was standing right behind me. She was a petite Korean-american girl, very sweet but as you will see also prone to being caught underfoot! She must have been almost half as tall as me. I happened to take a step back, but I backed up into her because I didn’t know she was right behind me. I lost my balance and fell against her. We were standing near a wall, so basically I toppled backwards which shoved her into a wall and she banged her head HARD before I completely fell on her.
As soon as I fell I got up immediately and made sure se was okay. She was a little dazed and had a bruise on her forehead where she hit the wall, but was okay. I was so embarassed. I was scared I hurt her- considering I was twice as big and heavy, and the fact that I fell on her RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER PARENTS.
Anybody else have any stories of accidentally hurting someone?
I was on a swing and this little toddler came by and I kicked him coming down very hard which knocked him on his face and when I came back down I hit him again. His dad was so angry and I was embarassed because I’m in High School and I was hanging out with my friends on a kiddie playground and hurt the one person that was really supposed to be in the playground, the little boy. :smack:
and
I once was going into a restroom and when I opened the door I hit a 7 year old in the head with the door. No bruises though.
I went to see a play once and had trouble finding my seat and I was still trying to find it when the lights went out and the show started. I started to enter the row where I thought my seat was, but the usher called out to me that I was actually in the row in front of that one, or something. As I started to back out, I stepped on some poor guy’s foot. That doesn’t sound so bad, but I’m a big guy and I put all of my weight on his foot. He made a sound that I recognized as a scream behind closed lips. Poor guy. After the show, I waited until I was sure he’d left before I got up. I just couldn’t face him after that.
Several years back when my sister and I were still kids, our family went to the local theatre to watch a movie. We had all seated ourselves and this woman had to squeeze through the narrow space between our family and the seats in front of us. These were before the days of bigger leg room, so it was a little difficult for her to pass through. I should also mention that this woman is pretty big, which added to her difficulty.
Then comes the bad part… Right as she passes over my sister (she was maybe 6 at the time) she slips and her butt lands on the small body of my kid sister. Sister gets a large scrape (the kind where skin comes off) above her knee. Sis starts crying. Woman apologizes profusely and scoots away embarrassed. I felt so badly for the woman, but it was so funny, I couldn’t help but laugh inside. I’m evil.
After coming back from a field trip when I was 9 or so, I slammed my friend’s finger in the car door. Worse, her mom was the one driving. :smack: At least there wasn’t any permanent damage.
I didn’t actually hurt him, but in a story similar to the OP’s I came very close to trampling a less-than-knee-high boy in, of all places, the Hiroshima Peace Museum. He toddled into (and almost under) me while I was walking between the exhibits, and I barely managed to keep my balance. His mother and I then attempted to outdo each other in the Horrified and Embarassed Apology competition. I think I was the more horrified of the two, though. If her kid had tripped the big gaijin woman that would have given her reason to blush, but as an American I was already feeling guilty enough without stomping on any innocent Japanese babies practically right at Ground Zero!
Not too long ago I was in a thrift store and I had a shopping cart. There was a little boy on the floor who was pushing a toy car around. I saw him, and knew he did not see me - he was concentrating on varooming the little car. He started moving toward me, and I moved my cart out of his way - I thought. He took a sudden turn and ran his head SMACK into the cart, so hard that he flew backwards and landed on his keister. Fortunately, he was more stunned than hurt, and his mother was right behind me and saw the whole thing. I apologized profusely, but she said, “Eh. He’s not hurt, and that’ll teach him to watch where he’s going.” But I still feel bad about that one - the impact was hard enough to rattle my arm bones!
And just last week, my daughter and a friend were horsing around by the pool and the friend teasingly picked up a shoe and said, “If you don’t stop splashing me, I am going to whack you in the head.” At which point she lost her grip on the shoe, which flipped in the air end-over-end and came down, heel first, on my daughter’s eye. Had I not personally seen the kid fumbling to regain her grip on the flying shoe, I would have been furious with her. My daughter has a black eye that looks like she went two rounds with a professional boxer. (And yes, we gave both girls the “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye” speech.)
Well, Fox Vixen (my wife) just sent our 5-month old Fox Pup sprawling across our recently cleaned (and thus slick) floor. The pup was sitting by the door, waiting to greet my wife. Pup was a bit confused, but not wounded.
Well, this is the strangest and I’m sorry incident we’ve had recently. We were playing horse as we do most every nice day. My husband has been very religious about working out and has dropped quite a few pounds and is really firming up. As a joke he was telling our friends to punch him in the stomach to show how firm his abs have become. :rolleyes:
Well, one of our friends decided to punch him in the stomach…with her thumb inside her fist. She is now wearing a brace and has a hairline fracture in her wrist. Hubby felt really bad and now apologizes every time he sees her.
Last month my father, who has been paralyzed from the waist down for 27 years, was in the hospital for surgery. The aid, a large, strapping sort of fellow, picked him up to put him in a wheelchair and dropped him and broke dad’s leg.
The aid was almost crying from worry and embarrasment.
Been there, done that. Except it was my mom’s fingers. She was getting into the front passenger seat of the van and put her left hand on the doorframe of one of the sliding side doors. I swung the sliding door closed and when I realized where her hand was, I tried to stop it, but the inertia and my late realization led to the slamming of the door on her fingers.
My mom cried in pain and my dad was yelling at me like nothing else. I was so embarrassed and I felt so badly that I didn’t move. No permanent damage was done. This actually happened this past year.
Yet another: Today I was on my way to a job interview and I was just walking through the mall to get to the store. I was staring straight ahead and I didn’t notice a small boy running in front of me. Well, we bumped into each other and he fell on his butt. I think he was about to cry, but he was too scared to. I pulled him up, apologized, and his dad came over. I left as quickly as possible.
This was bad. I’m glad to confess. I was eight, so I guess my brother would have been sixteen or so. We’re playing in the pool, and as usual he decides to try to hold me under. Instinctually I grab the closest thing to whack him with so he’ll let me go, and he does. But he comes up bleeding. It was the head for a metal watering can, and he had a cut on his forehead like an inch and a half long. In retrospect, fifteen years later, he kinda looked like Harry Potter. He was pissed. Good thing he liked me.
-Lil
I pulled into a gas station while driving cross country. I started to get out when a guy came running out and said 'Hi, whatcha need" It was only then I noticed I had pulled into a full-service station. :smack: Well obviously I couldn’t admit I was to stupid to read the sign, So I sat there pretending I meant it all along. Finally the gas was done and I handed him a twenty, for 18.50 figuring the rest was a tip. I fiddled with the map, then started to take off. Almost running him over as he ran back to give me my change. He stuck his hand in a window that was only about an inch open. I grabbed the window roller-downer and gave it crank. The wrong way :smack: I’m pretty sure I broke a finger or two, and worse still, he dropped the money as I crushed his hand, and it fell under my seat, where I couldn’t get to much of it. All I could grab was a quarter, which I gave to him.
I appolgized with a glowing red face, and finally just took off out of embarrassment. I think I broke his hand and gave him a whole quarter for his trouble.
I was climbing the stairs behind a Japanese sensei when i tripped over the step, my head went forward and right into this poor teacher’s shiri. It wasn’t so much an injury but a baka gai-jin moment and there was the chikan factor too… man that was embarrasing fortunately she just shrugged it off.
When I was in elementary school, the big thing to do at the bus stop while waiting for the bus was to throw rocks at the mailboxes (our own). I never did it because I was afraid to hit a car, even though we were in the middle of the country and not that meny cars drove by. Well, for some reason one day I decided it was time to throw a rock. Let me tell you, I am about as unathletic and uncoordinated as you can get. I’m not really sure how it happened, but the rock went in the exact opposite direction that I intended to throw it, and hit a little 3rd grader right in the temple. Watching the gash in his head just open up and watching the blood start gushing out of the side of his face - I don’t think I have ever felt worse. :eek: :smack:
Oh man. I took a documentary film class last year, and got a part-time job taping some lectures for a neighboring college. I had to lug all the equipment from my dorm over to the other school, which included a very substantially heavy, metal tripod- I’d fold it up and carry it over my shoulder. Can you see where this is going?? I was entering an auditorium once and passing along the back of a full-house when I felt and heard a CRACK: someone had thrown their head back at the instant I was passing, or else the tripod slipped a little on my shoulder, and I completely brained some girl in the back row! She grabbed her head and gave me a wounded look, and I apologized but felt awful- it was a pretty hard blow with such a heavy object. The worst part was that I still had to stay and tape the lecture not 20 feet away, while she and her friends shot me periodic dirty glances.
When I was about nine or ten, and my brother was two or three, he was sitting on my lap when I was sitting on the couch. I shifted my weight, and he fell off my lap. That wouldn’t have been so bad, except he took a header right into the corner of the coffee table and busted his eyebrow open. He screamed bloody murder and bled all over the place. Luckily, one of our neighbors was a doctor, and she said he’s be just fine. He still has a scar under his eyebrow.
Okay, I didn’t actually injure this person, but this thread reminded me of this. It’s funny.
My best friend has a crappy car, and for a long time the passenger side window didn’t roll down. So she was driving and I noticed that there was a mostly-empty pop bottle in the cupholder that was VERY old. And it was grossing me out, so I told her to roll her window down so I could chuck it out the window. Well it went whizzing past her head and all the old nasty pop came out of the bottle and sprayed all over her face! It was sad but funny.
Well that reminds me of another pop bottle related accident. My cousin and I were walking down this hill towards the mall or something. I had a full bottle of pop that had went flat and I didn’t want to carry it around with me so my cousin said “just throw it over there”. So I grabbed it by the neck and spun around so I could get some distance on it, but it slipped out of my hands and smacked right into the back of her head.
This actually just happened last week - in bed, of all places. I was having a strange dream and I was apparently thrashing all over the place. In my sleep, I somehow threw my arms out and knocked hell out of the SO - he woke up to my arm repeatedly smacking him in the face. I was asleep the whole time until he woke me up - I wasn’t entirely sure what I had done, but then I realized that I was stretched out across the bed diagonally, too, leaving him about six inches of space for his whole body. I usually sleep curled up in the ‘spoon’ position next to him, but I must’ve been having a crazy-ass dream.
I apologized profusely when he woke me up. Luckily, he didn’t seem to care and found it funny:).
