Less than an hour ago I was in Nordstrom’s Rack buying a badly needed new pair of workout shoes. The woman at the counter just in front of me was also buying shoes and looked to be about finished so I stepped up behind her. The guy ringing her up said he needed the right shoe (she was wearing the new ones) to scan the barcode and remove the security tag.
She lifted up her right foot and suddenly and swiftly leaned down to take the shoe off, promptly smashing her head into the counter in front of her. She stood up wobbly, then fell backwards in a heap. I was able to get my arms around her to stop her fall - she felt like a sack of potatoes. I laid her down gently and saw that her forehead was bleeding profusely. It probably took 10-12 stitches to close her up. Her friend took her to the hospital and probably racked up a $100 bill for cleaning the blood out of her car seat.
No matter how badly you felt for her, it was funny as hell to see it happen. Some people could barely stifle laughs.
She’s going to look like Frankenstein for weeks and have to tell the story over and over. Or come up with a good cover story.
Christmas party at a hotel, a few years back. The party is over, and everyone is milling about in reception waiting for taxis/pickups.
There’s one woman there who is well beyond drunk. I mean apocalyptically wasted. She’s sitting in one of the chairs in reception when a cab driver comes in and calls her name.
She tries to get up, fumbles, and falls flat on the floor. Tries to get up again, but is simply too drunk to manage it. So then she starts crawling on her hands and knees across the lobby to the doors. A couple of guys try to help her up, but she waves them away, shouting (imagine this in a drunkenly slurred, East End London accent) "Leave me alone! I’ve still got my dignity, y’know!"
I couldn’t help myself and just burst out laughing. I wasn’t alone either.
Her driver managed to disappear (fair enough, I wouldn’t have wanted her in my car either) and our taxi turned up just then, so I never found out what happened to her. I hope she was alright.
Once a friend of mine tripped leaving a bar. He fell forward into a spring loaded door. The door bursts open and he somersaults out and lands sprawled on the sidewalk. The noise he made during the entire episode just added to the scene. For all practical purposes it looked like someone threw him head first out of the bar. I was worried he was seriously injured yet it was all I could do to hold in the laughter.
(Maybe not number one, but it’s the first one that comes to mind.)
Many years ago I was with my wife at a sit-down diner-style restaurant at the mall. They had booths with short dividers between them.
Some time during our conversation I needed to punctuate a point with a quick wave of my hand, and I managed to clip the tip of my straw with my pinky.
The straw flexed like a springboard, then leapt forth in a graceful arc, over the divider, and it hit an old lady on the other side in the eye.
I immediately began apologizing profusely, trying to explain how it was the weirdest fluke of an accident, but she was having nothing of it. She gave the nastiest old-lady glare that she could muster with her one eye still smarting from the insult.
I sure felt bad for her, but it was difficult to keep a straight face.
I hope that Nordstrom’s Rack makes things right for the lady from the OP. No, it shouldn’t be a lottery win for her, but a customer being hurt at a place of business should have their resulting bills paid at least.
Singburi province in central Thailand, 1988. I’m sitting at an outdoor table at a restaurant. Down the street comes a Thai couple. She is furiously screaming at the man with a blood lust while chasing him waving a butcher knife. He is running ahead of her with his penis hanging out, but far from being scared, he keeps stopping when he gets a little ahead of her, turns around, laughs maniacally and waves his penis at her. This enrages her all the more, and she speeds up and yells louder each time. This cycle keeps repeating until they’ve passed from view.
My dad, in the middle of a Parkinsons’ seizure. He was throwing hospital orderlies around. It took four of them to dogpile on him. It was horrifying…but also really hilarious.
(One of the orderlies later told me how proud he was of my dad, for being so strong. He said that having that kind of strength was a good thing, healthwise, and was really promising for my dad’s lifespan. He said he admired my dad’s fighting spirit! Now there was a really nice hospital orderly!)
Hurt on their property, by their countertop, following instructions from their employee? It’s the price of doing business. Not a fancy settlement, just pay her bill. I hate frivolous lawsuits like the next guy, but IMHO she should be made whole.[/hijack]
My husband managed to fall out of our boat while he was trying to pee off the front. It was dusk and he had asked me to turn my head so I didn’t really see it happen, but boy did I hear it. He actually slid under the rail like he’d been greased and splashed into the lake.
I was sputtering with laughter when he came up. He was sputtering too, though not so much with laughter. At least not at first.
I also could not help but to laugh at the guy in San Francisco who would hide behind branches and jump out and scare people walking on the wharf.
Years ago my best friend and I were working at a peach orchard. He was up in the tree when he slipped. He was caught hanging upside down, with his arms flailing, yelling for help. I thought that it was hilarious, kind of like an Elmer Fudd thing or something similar.
Our living/family room has the stairs to the second story just off to the side. There are just pickets and the hand rail, so you can see all the steps up to the second floor landing.
13 steps.
There was an empty plastic laundry basket at the top of the stairs. And our cat Stormy.
Stormy jumps in the basket which gave it just enough umph to send it sliding down the stairs. Stormy road the laundry basket down the stairs and did a perfect 10 landing in the living room. Stormy calmly gets out or the basket, and as cats will do “Just as I planned”.
I was sitting first in line at a red light. Fully marked cop car across the street waiting also. Car next to me in the left turn lane. Our town has retarded light control programmers. You never know what sequence the lights are going to operate on.
So the genius next to me assumes ( I guess) that when the straight ahead green light blinks on, so does his left turn light. Only it doesn’t. It was straight ahead for me and the cop on the other side of the intersection. The Mr. Left Turner hesitated that few milliseconds it takes most motorists to conclude that, yes, he’s waiting properly and I can proceed through the intersection. Then he gassed it. The cop and I were both half-way through the intersection when Mr. Left Turn T-Boned the cop car at a high rate of speed. It’s the only time I’ve seen airbags deploy. In the cop car. Hit in the side, not head on. Even though I saw it more in my peripheral vision the adrenaline rush I experienced caused me to see the events very clearly. When MLT hit the cop car, he spun around a number of times and landed in the sidewalk/ planter strip area on the side of the road. The cop car moved sideways a few feet but was basically in line with his original line of travel. In reality it took a split second but time slowed down and it seemed to take minutes for all the action to transpire. I don’t know how he got moving so fast from a standing start in a beater old Ford. He took off like a top fuel dragster.
I slammed on my brakes as did the other cars behind me. I ran over to the police car and the officer was shaken but seemed OK. Someone yelled that they were going to call 911 (cell phones were still bricks an only a few people had them) so I ran over to where MLT ended up. He was obviously drunk and smelled like he was out-gassing gin from every pore. He couldn’t stand, alcohol or crash effects difficult to say. Bleeding from a gash on his forehead. Profusely bleeding. But he was pissed off. He was swearing at the other driver, didn’t realize he’d hit a cop, that guy was blind, stupid, gonna sue his ass off, etc, etc…
Me and another driver are trying to calm him down, get him to sit down, see how bad he’s hurt.
Cop finally gets out of his car, comes over and starts asking the standard cop questions. The dumb ass thinks this is a cop who showed up to investigate and starts in again on what a dumb-ass the other driver was. About this time I realized nobody is seriously injured and this is high theater right in front of me. So I just stood out of the way and watched.
MLT was indignant, wanted the driver arrested, I’ll press charges, he’s just making things worse for himself with everything he said. Slurred. At this point, the other driver and me are looking at each other, the cop, the drunk, each other and it’s obvious we’re dying to laugh. But we can’t. This is Serious… Then the cop who got hit laughed and we both lost it. About the time more cops showed up, the guy is still going on about the dumb driver of the other car, they take about 2 seconds to figure out what’s going on and they lose it too.
So the drunk gets cuffed and stuffed, we give statements, go about our business and the next day I see a story about this in the local paper. Turns out the police officer had a broken arm and a few other minor injuries. The drunk was unharmed, but surprise, was uninsured, suspended and had prior DUI’s.
I don’t think that guy ever realized he hit a cop car.
As traffic accidents go, this was minor, but someone could really have been hurt and that was going through my mind the whole time I was laughing my ass off, but damn, it was funny.
We were coming up to our slip, which happened to be at the intersection of the main pier and a smaller pier that was the end of the other slips. Our usual technique was for me to hop off the bow on to the main pier and drop a loop over a piling as my husband turned the boat and lined it up to back in. (Sailboat, so single engine and not nearly as maneuverable as a power boat.)
This particular day, I stepped outside the lifelines and inched too far forward along the bow pulpit, and before we got close enough for me to make the leap to the pier, I went in the water. Now, I knew I was plenty far from the propeller, I knew the water wasn’t very deep, and I knew I’d bob back up in a few seconds, so I just pinched my nose closed, held on to my sunglasses, and waited to float to the surface.
When I got up, one of our boat neighbors was leaping in to rescue me (poor man had a heart condition - I felt so bad about scaring him) and my husband was freaking out, worried about me. Except for worrying about my rescuer, I thought the whole scenario was hilarious and it was my own dumb fault. What was even funnier were all the arms reaching down to pull me out, when there was a swim ladder not 5 feet from where I bobbed up. I appreciated their concern and all, but wow, what an apparent overreaction.
Sadly, or maybe luckily ;), this occurred long before there were smart phones and youtube…
Many moons ago I had a roommate with a very nice German Shepard. Call him Butch. And a sliding door to the porch that had a screen on it that slid too. We didn’t usually use the screen.
Butch got excited about something (as dogs do) and charge outside not seeing the closed screen. Wamo. The screen pops out of the bottom of the track but is still attached at the top. The screen ‘door’ (just a nylon one) pivots at the top out away from the Butch. Butch, stopped by the screen is a bit confused. The screen door is now pivoted away from him at the top and he can’t see what he ran into.
The screen door pivots back down while the dog is standing confused. And Wamo again. Right in the kisser.
Of course the dog was not hurt in any way, but he didn’t every charge through that door again.
She should pay her how bills, IMHO. My business insurance has had to pay out $30,000 medical bills because people have tripped over their own shoelaces (on camera) or in one case tripped over literally nothing, just…tripped and hurt themselves. If they did it at home or even 30 feet further away their own insurance would have covered it, but because they did it on my property (through zero fault of my own), I get stuck with higher rates. I understand that if someone trips over a rug that’s curled up or gets cut on rack that has sharp edge, that makes sense, that’s my fault, but if you bend over and smack your head on a counter (because you’re wearing the merchandise out of the store)…that’s on you.
But, it is what it is, and they [Nordstrom’s] probably did pay it. Where does it end? If you reached into your purse and sliced your finger open on something sharp would they have to pay? If your shoe came untied in their parking lot and you tripped over it and hurt yourself, should they have to pay?
My SIL and I are talking New York jokes while walking in a mall. I say “There’s the classic tourist going up to a native and asking 'Will you tell me where the Empire State Building is or should I just go fuck myself.” I step on the down escalator.
My SIL asks “Or should I what?”
I look back say in a loud voice “OR SHOULD I GO FUCK MYSELF?” and realizing I’m talking to the older woman who go on the escalator between us. I snap my head forward, cover my mouth and my laugh comes out as a very loud SNORT." My SIL says “Oh, shit.”
Cracking up so hard at poor Butch. Seriously, this is the third time I read your post and I laughed every time.
Mine is animal related as well. We have carpeted steps going upstairs. No risers, so they look open. The cats do this game of clambering up the back of the steps. The steps weren’t designed for this sort of abuse and one day one of the cats pulled the carpet off the riser. Dangled while frantically grabbing for something, anything that would hold him. Nothing worked, so he dropped a foot to the ground, hissed at the carpet that he had pulled off and then strutted off with his disdainful cat attitude.
She’s sitting in one of the chairs in reception when a cab driver comes in and calls her name.
