Safety First

In order to be more healthy, I've decided to start taking the stairs at work instead of the elevator. This isn't some rinky-dink commitment, either, like getting a colonic before the Oscars. I work on the eighth floor, so when I go upstairs there are a lot of them for me to climb.

I've also started eating healthy lunches. For example, today I had a ham sandwich, an orange, some potatoes, and a bottle of water: nothing but health food for me. Okay, it is true that the potatoes were fried and salted, the ham sandwich was a foot long and covered in mayonnaise, and the orange had chocolate on it, but it was healthier than my usual lunch eating spoonfuls of sugared lard out of the container.

After I was finished, I decided I wanted a chocolate waffle. So I grabbed some change out of my desk and headed down the stairs. Since I didn't know how much the waffles cost, I decided to grab 1.50, which was a fifty-cent piece, two twenty-cent pieces, and six ten-cent pieces.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, I decided to toss the handful of coins up in the air and catch it as I walked out into the stairwell. I caught eight coins, but the ninth (a ten-cent piece) got away from me and went "Ching!" on the stairs and bounced up into the air.

Plonk! It hit the handrail and went vertically.

Whack! It hit the wall on the other side, and then in a totally improbable bounce it ricocheted off the stairs again. I couldn’t have done it if I wanted to. So now the coin was on the landing for the 7th, and I was on the 8th.

Ching! Plong! Whack! It ricocheted again, dropping another flight of stairs, and was on the 6th. I couldn't see it any more, but I could hear it echoing through the stairwell.

Ching! Plonk! Whack! Fifth floor.

Ching! Plonk! Whack! Fourth floor.

Ching! Plonk! Whack! Third floor.

Ching! Plonk! Sploink!

"OW! Dammit, my eye!"

That didn't sound good. I waited a moment and heard no more coin bouncing, but I did hear a great deal of cursing from the bottom step.

"Hey, asshole, you just hit me in the face!"

I held my breath, saying nothing. I didn't recognize the voice, but it was one of those voices that sounded like it might be coming from somebody with hairy knuckles. And statistics show that hairy-knuckled people are both prone to violence and typically bigger than you are, probably because they're more closely related to gorillas.

"That's it, fucker, I'm gonna come up there and kick your ass!" the hairy-knuckled, overreacting, angry man said.

I heard heavy treads on the steps far below, which is no mean feat since they're made of concrete. This was definitely somebody I didn't wanna meet in the stairwell.

"There's no way you could make it all the way up ten flights of stairs!" I used the huskiest voice I could muster up to try to sound tough.

He continued to climb. "Bastard! You're gonna be shitting shoe leather for a week!"

That really didn't sound good. "Yeah? Well, you'll be making change from your eyeballs!"

And I threw the entire handful of coins down the stairwell, trusting in luck that at least one would hit its mark. Preferably the fifty-cent piece, since it was the biggest.

Ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching-ching! Plonk-plonk- plonk- plonk- plonk- plonk- plonk- plonk! Whack-whack- whack- whack- whack- whack- whack- whack!

And so on and so forth, until around floor four I heard the sound I'd been waiting for:

SPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINKSPLOINK!

Followed quickly by "Son of a biiiiiiiiiiitch!"

CRASH! BANG! POW!

Then silence for a few seconds, followed by an ominous groaning.

I decided I didn't need a chocolate waffle after all and went back to my office.

And I also decided to go back to eating sugared lard.