(59) The accident on the stairs.
This participant regrets not having anything else to contribute. All he could do was provide an account of a few accidents he remembers. Given the debilitating and tragic nature of these, he did better than he thinks. The accident on the stairs upon rushing to tell a friend good news.
Did this ever happen to you? It can be quite serious. He knows two neighbours, one upstairs and one downstairs. The stairs are semi-circular. The guy upstairs has a shortwave transistor. The guy downstairs was recently back from a trip where he gave a lecture.
He asked the guy upstairs to try and catch the broadcast. As soon as he did, he was so excited at hearing his friends over the waves, he rushed out quickly downstairs to tell them but fell right away face first on the stairs. The guy downstairs wasn't there at the moment anyways!
When he arrived, he found the guy from upstairs unconscious on the steps and called an ambulance. When he regained consciousness at the hospital, he was in bed with a broken arm in a cast, a fractured skull, a broken nose, and missing front teeth. That's when he got to tell him the good news. Once himself he ordered a pizza.
An hour later, he started supper at home and called back the restaurant. He asked if his delivery was cancelled. The girl knew nothing about it. She said it must have been an old one. She took his number, and the manager called. He said the delivery man showed up twice, but I wasn't home.
When he reviewed my address, it was wrong. The girl got it wrong the first time. Apologizing, he offers to still have it delivered, though not for free. Our guy accepts, and half an hour later the delivery man arrives with the pizza. No one said a word about it.
He even got a $1.25 tip. He was so happy, he rushed to his car and pulled out right in front of a big truck. He died instantly. He died because he was so happy the order was taken finally; nothing was said, and he even got a tip. Another time, when he was young, his class went swimming as an outing.
It was at a big pool, and many other schools had the same idea the same day. There were kids from another school swimming close to his class. Among them was one who looked fat and stupid.
One girl in his class, he recalls, had goggles, and apparently, while swimming underwater, she would have seen him, that fat, dumb student, swim forward quickly with his eyes closed, headfirst into the wall, shout bubbles, and cover his head with his hands.
She found that so funny she burst out laughing underwater and died drowning. The old lady down the street died picking a flower in her garden. It was a pretty wildflower she hadn't noticed before. She bent down in a hurry to see it closer and was paralyzed.
She was of poor health, suffered a heart attack, and fell. She was reported missing and found dead in her garden. A fat colleague of his died tripping over her shoelaces in a Chinese restaurant. She banged her head hard and died quickly. She was too much in a hurry to get more food.
One summer, some of his friends were having a big outdoor BBQ. The porch was crowded. There were two big dogs, and accidentally, this guy stepped on a paw. The dog yelped so loud it scared someone into falling crooked off the porch.
The guy broke his neck and is in a wheelchair for life. He hates dogs now. A woman he knows of got a severe shock trying to remove bread from the toaster with a fork. Half of her face is permanently paralyzed. Considering all these accidents, he says he's lucky
