Fall #73 in an ongoing series

Some of you may recall that about the second or third week that I was at Thomson, I had this ridiculous and humiliating slo-mo flailing fall while leaving my friend Rojo Nixon’s cube. It happened that the 3 “Prada Girls” were all huddled in the cube directly across from mine discussing the latest Vera Bradley collection when this all happened, so of course I just wanted to curl up and die.

I had the sequel to that here at the new gig, on Tuesday. This time, I was walking with a cup of coffee in my hand (of course) up the carpeted stairs of the big open stairwell in our main lobby and not holding the handrail, which was my downfall. Or upfall, as it turned out, because my foot caught on the carpet, dragged too much, caused me to lurch side to side while my arm was flailing and my other arm was trying to not spill the coffee. Eventually, gravity took over and I tumbled until I collapsed upward in a little heap across several stairs. I immediately tried to spring up and pretend like nothing had happened, but I’m not as agile as in my younger days and I managed to just look like a wounded seal, and spill half of the cup of coffee (why, God, why???) in the process. Of course, there were several witnesses, all of whom were genuinely concerned and asking if I was all right, when all I wanted to do was become invisible. So I made a little joke of it, you know “everything’s under control – no one saw anything – nothing happened” – but I still felt like a total jackhole. Score one for e-Doe. At least I provided some entertainment to Michelle, the receptionist. I know she gets bored up there all day.

Now, as it happens, I had written that earlier part in an email to people, but there is an epilogue. I had a meeting on Tuesday afternoon and when I walked into the room, a very animated gentleman stood up and said “you must be Erin,” and shook my hand. He knew I was me because he knew he’d be meeting me at this meeting (redundant much?) and I was the only person in the room he didn’t recognize. The kicker is that he followed that up with, “you’re the young lady who fell on the stairs”. Awesome. If my outsides were a reflection of my insides, everyone in the room would have seen me actually shrivel into a raisin and fall under the table. But that isn’t physically possible, so instead I said “yep, I really like to make an impression!” and then he “graciously” pointed out that I did make a nice recovery. And then, and this is the worst/best part, he went on to say “you know, when I saw you fall, I thought to myself, ‘oh, I hope that’s not Erin…’”. Ahhhh, you do have a way with the words, sir. Yes, you do.