Embarrassing Moments

Since I don’t want Christie to hog all the embarrassment glory, I thought I’d shared one of my less stellar moments with you today. This story still tickles me to the point of laughing until I cry because, well, quite frankly, it’s just as funny as it is embarrassing. Might as well laugh, right?

So the story goes like this – my husband is a body shop estimator. Basically, you wreck your car, he’s the guy that gets it fixed. He started a new job at a new dealership complete with new boss, and his new boss invited us over to his house to watch football. The new boss and his wife seemed all right so we ventured to their house for a Cowboys game.

New boss had built one of those custom homes in a fairly exclusive area of a nice suburb around Dallas. It was probably 4k or so square feet, vaulted ceilings, stone countertops, huge spiral staircase, etc. All the fixins’ of a fancier home. They had just moved in a month ago.

Their media room was upstairs, so we grabbed some drinks/snacks and headed upstairs for the football watching part. At halftime, we decided to venture back down for refills. Now this was a night game, so the house wasn’t lit up by sunlight. And downstairs the only lights on were in the kitchen so the huge spiral staircase was dimly lit.

Now, the entryway at the bottom of the stairs was all hardwood floor, and the builder of the house had talked New Boss into paying $800 for what he called a “designer step” – meaning the last step of the spiral staircase was the same hardwood as the floor at the bottom rather than carpeted like the rest of the stairs. Well, this is a wonderful thought, except that in dim light that last step blends in with the entryway floor.

Yeah, you see it coming, don’t you? So I take one large step onto what I think is the entryway floor and clip that last step with the back of my heel. Not good. I loose my balance and reach back to grab the railing to try and recover. I succeed only in grabbing a wrought iron spindle from the stairs and literally wrenched the entire thing out of the railing.

So I’m flinging to the ground, rolling with a wrought iron weapon as I fall. It must have been a glorious sight. I finally tumble to a stop against the entryway wall, still clutching a (supposedly permanent) piece of their brand-new house. New Boss’s wife was horrified that I had killed myself – hell, everyone was horrified until I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I had single-handedly torn up their home in one disastrous step.

Once New Boss decided I was going to live, he went off in a tirade about the step. It went something like this:

“GD designer step. F’ing builder talked me into paying for that s*%$! $800 and you’re the third person who’s fallen off it. When I see him again, I’m shoving that entire last step right up his ____!”

Well, you get the idea.

- Deadly (to stair spindles) DeLeon