The Blog Thing of Bloggerness: Life Lessons: Sticky Things and Tables

Today I thought I would regale you with tales of very interesting-interestingness. It's time for: Life Lessons (with Taylor)!

I am moving back home for the summer in about a week and a half. As such, I have been getting my stuff ready to move home and taking some stuff with me, etc. Yesterday I decided I should take my pictures down off the wall in preparation to be taken home today. I'm pretty eager to move home and generally fidgety about it, so that is why I decided they needed to go now. Unfortunately, removing them from the wall was not as easy as I'd hoped. I vaguely recall being warned (perhaps by Amy?) that the sticky items I was using to append my pictures to the wall would not, in fact, come off as easily as advertised. Despite the warning I received, I continued on in my rashness in putting the pictures up, convinced that surely if something was going to go wrong with these sticky things it would not happen to me.

This confidence in mind, I pulled on the sides of my first framed picture, and realized with alarm what was happening only after I removed it from the wall. I guess the wall was simply too attached to my pictures (haha, pun) so it decided to come with it. So now there are these horrible patches of wall where the top layer of paint has been ripped off and I get to fix that before I can move out. The patches created by the smaller painting are the largest offender, possibly because I was aware of their possibility at this point and trying not to create them. I do not think those sticky things I used to attach the pictures to the wall are worth it. They're just too strong. I'll probably add them to my list of nemesises. Nemesi? Nemesisi? Spellcheck doesn't like any of those, so I'm sticking with nemesises. Which really doesn't sound good at all. Nemesis is perhaps impossible to pluralize.

Damage from large picture

Damage from small picture

Lesson: Do not use those square sticky things. They are too strong.

My next life lesson is another interesting and not at all boring story. I was at work this past Tuesday, and one of the tasks I needed to do was set up two tables in the auditorium lobby. After achieving all I could in the auditorium without calling my boss and admitting that, although I claimed I could handle set up on my own, I was going to need help, I decided to go ahead and set up the two tables I needed to in the lobby. Then it would look less like I spent five to ten minutes trying to figure out whether there were any tables backstage. I set out to achieve my goal, knowing where tables are kept in the lobby. I went over to the tables and the realization that they were, in fact, quite large and heavy dawned on me. But, being the intrepid worker I was, I started dragging them across the floor anyway. Once I had situated them in the relative areas I expected them to be wanted, I began to set them up. I pulled all the legs of the first table out, and then the hard part of actually standing the table up came (note: this is much harder than it looks, tables are weirdly slippery).

I placed my foot underneath the table to get some leverage to help me grab it, and carelessly left it underneath the table. What happened next was utterly disastrous. The table was about as long as my arms are width wise, and it slipped from my grip as I tried to pull it to standing position and landed on my foot. I did not outwardly express my pain, but it hurt. A lot. I finished setting up the tables (very carefully) and half limped my way backstage to call my boss and request help with light focus (this means aiming lights to the best place for them on stage). My boss figured out what we needed to do with the lights while I finished setting up the sound and pretended my foot was fine.

The people using the auditorium arrived and my boss sent me up into the catwalk to move the lights around. It turns out, climbing ladders on a hurt foot is very painful. I considered that I may have broken my big toe because it really hurt, but I'm a pro at not breaking bones, so I decided against that. I spent the rest of the night half-limping when I had to walk (I was sitting for a while while two women gave a presentation), convinced my foot/big toe must look impressively injured. When I got home and took off my socks and shoes to inspect the damage, my foot looked mostly unharmed but slightly red. By the next day it looked just like any other non-injured day. I was pretty disappointed in how my injury chose to present itself. In fact, now if I want to show someone how I hurt myself, they'll just look at my foot probably and say, "I don't see anything." And I will be sad, because my foot still hurts but you can't tell at all by looking.

My foot looking totally uninjured (circle around where the at least bruise should be)

Lesson: If you're setting up tables, you should probably just ask your boss to help you. If you're too prideful to do so, do not put your foot under where the table might fall should you drop it. If you so choose to ignore my first two warnings, at least make sure your foot has the common decency to display the injury it received so others may comment on it and offer condolences such as "Ow, I bet that hurt," and, "Your foot must hurt," and, "You should be more careful with tables."