Your Schadenfreude for the Day

You ever have those moments where you just wanna press the proverbial Control/Command + Z button combo on the past five minutes and just start over? Well, join the club, ladies and gents, because I just had a ridiculous set of mishaps befall me in very close succession.

I have long been known to have ridiculous little everyday things happen to me, like dropping an egg on my foot or getting toothpaste in my eye, and then I dramatically share them with the world at large so we all can have a good schadenfreude laugh. (I am the KING of laughing at myself, no joke.)

Anyway, on to recent events. This afternoon, I had a handful of cassette tapes that I was going to go reshelve in our stacks upstairs. (I currently work at the Nunn Center, an oral history library in the Special Collections department at the University of Kentucky, and a big part of my job is digitizing old cassette copies of accessioned interviews.) The stacks upstairs are dark, cramped, somewhat creepy, and only accessible by a janky, old elevator. Additionally, the floor is locked, so I need to take a key along to even access the floor.

I grabbed the cassettes and went over to pick up the elevator key from a desk drawer when I slammed my big toe into the desk corner, which caused the key to slip out of my hands. This should have been a sign. I should have put the tapes down, nursed my toe, and tried again later in the afternoon.

But, no. I forged ahead.

I headed out (read: limped out) of the office and headed toward the elevator. When the elevator doors opened, I started to step inside. The elevator was having none of that; it proceeded to start closing on me without even opening all the way, slamming into my shoulder and almost knocking me over. I managed to get in the old, creaky thing before it slammed shut, so I’ll call that a victory. (Really, nothing else about this tale is remotely victorious, so huzzah.)

Shoulder aching and toe throbbing, I unlock the seventh floor and the elevator begins its ascent. Naturally, the door opens and the elevator has not even lifted me all the way to the seventh floor. I have to step up about four inches into the darkened stacks. By this point, I’m questioning the wisdom of this entire endeavor, because something CLEARLY has it out for me, and I’m debating getting back into the elevator.

But, no. I forged ahead.

I wind my way over to the oral history stacks and try to turn on the aisle light. It’s not working, to the surprise of absolutely NO ONE. I sigh and set my tapes down on the ground in the dark and begin to place them back in the smallish boxes where they belong.

I pull down the box for the final tape, which is, of course, on the top shelf. (Each box holds around forty cassettes.) As I’m pulling down the box, dust from the top of it just pours down into my face. I start coughing and, forgetting that I’m currently holding a box of forty cassettes in my hands, use my right hand to brush the dust out of my eyes. Since I’ve now let go of one side of the box entirely, simple physics intervenes, and the box crashes to the floor, making a clatter that was probably heard in the Nunn Center back on the ground floor.

Amidst much sighing, grumbling and minor cursing, I reorganized the tapes, reshelved the offending cassette, and left the stacks. I got back down to my desk, and just because my ice cream sundae of misery didn’t have a painful cherry on it yet, I slammed my knee on the desk top as I was scooting my chair in.

CONTROL/COMMAND + Z.