Friday: I have a very uncoordinated week

I’m not usually a clumsy person—when I was a kid, I hardly ever skinned my knee or fell off things. Up to now, I’ve only broken two small bones: My baby finger, which cracked when I was on our Grade 8 trip to Ottawa and, unchaperoned, we were chasing each other in the halls—I had almost caught a very cute male classmate when he stopped suddenly and I jammed my finger into his back which caused it to snap at the base. It went numb but looked so weird and bendy that I started freaking out. All the teachers had been partying and they basically drew straws to see who had to take me to the hospital, which made me feel very special and loved. The second bone was a toe. One night when K was a baby, she woke up screaming for some reason. I panicked because she wasn’t normally a screamer, so I went running towards the bedroom door WITHOUT my glasses. Unfortunately, I am literally as blind as a bat but without the benefit of sonar, so I slammed into the doorframe foot first. Someone close to me joked that it’s lucky my feet are so big or I would have broken my nose. Ha Ha, Dad. But it’s actually true, and instead of my nose, it was the second toe on my left foot. I ended up in K’s room, crying and bleeding and trying to comfort her while Ken went to get ice and offered to take me to the hospital, which DID make me feel very special and loved, even though I was in a lot of pain.

But lately, I’ve gotten very klutzy. Aside from walking into, or cracking my knee on about 5 different tables, and ending up with brightly coloured bruises on my legs, I’ve also experienced the following acts of uncoordinated-ness:

• Over the course of the week, I dropped 3 hand-held computers, called PDAs, on the concrete floor. We use these devices to input data, and they are currently VITAL to our work. But they are all about 15 years old, with technology that’s fairly obsolete, and batteries that need to be switched on the hour. They really are on their last legs, which is why dropping one makes everyone around you gasp. The first two I dropped out of sheer lack of fine motor skills—you have to turn them one way to scan a barcode, then the other way to input data, and I just can’t seem to master that very basic skill. The third time, I dropped it because a colleague came up behind me and startled me, causing me to jump three feet and toss the PDA into the air, where it landed on the concrete to the horror of all around me. Luckily these things have extremely durable casings, or, as one colleague quipped, I would be personally responsible for the whole system crashing.

• On Tuesday, we brought in lunch from a taco place. The next morning I went to put on my ID badge, and it had a big, gross-looking blotch on it. It also smelled like garlic and spices. When I looked more closely, I realized that there was chunk of tomato wedged in between the front and back of the two pieces of paper. How the hell did I manage to drop a piece of tomato INSIDE my ID badge? God only knows, but I had to take the thing apart, and cut the stain out because it was so nasty-looking. And smelling. I really liked my ID badge, too—I was going to keep it as a souvenir of my very cool new job, but now it’s just a symbol of my slobbiness. Sigh.

• On Thursday, we went to a sushi restaurant for lunch. While I didn’t spill anything on myself, I DID walk headfirst into the neon OPEN sign in the doorway. Technically, this wasn’t my fault. My much tinier colleague went out the wrong door, and I blindly followed, not paying much attention, until WHACK! She had managed to walk under the sign, but me being taller, and oblivious to my surroundings, walked straight into it, headfirst. I didn’t realize what had happened for a minute, until I saw the sign swinging dangerously and flickering, felt my head start to hurt and put two and two together. Luckily, it didn’t break—who knows how much those things cost to replace? More than a PDA, I’ll bet.

• Friday was the ultimate in klutziness. First, I managed to get myself all tangled up in Scotch tape 4 times, while trying to label boxes to go back to our office, until I finally gave up and stapled the labels on. This is why Ken does most of our Christmas wrapping. Anyone who knows me well has had the experience of receiving a gift that looks like it was wrapped by a 5 year-old. It’s not that I don’t care, I just figure the gift inside is more important than the crazy tape job holding the whole thing together. I had a friend once who used to iron tissue paper so that when she re-used it, it still looked crisp and neat. I, on the other hand, have been known to use whatever crumply shreds of tissue paper I can find, stuffed into a gift bag that may or may not represent the occasion (ie a Christmas bag at birthday time). You can very easily convert a Christmas bag into a birthday bag by using a Sharpie to draw strings on the ornaments, thereby turning them into balloons. Huzzah!
The final crazy thing that happened on Friday was in a bathroom stall. I had hung my purse on the hook on the back of the door, which was lucky, because when I went to stand up, I lost my balance and went face first into my purse. I say lucky because I would much rather do a faceplant into a handbag than a hook. Maybe all this clumsiness is a sign that I should exercise more. Or maybe it’s a sign that I shouldn’t—can you imagine what trouble I’d get into trying to do Zumba?