Have you ever had serial slapstick so severe it would have qualified you for the Keystone Kops?

intrepid. great question. i must think about this one for a minute, but surely, i have been there my friend!

these moments seem to occur when we are trying to rush, multitask or conserve time. i think one of those moments for me would also be in the kitchen.

while preparing to cook, i notice an exploded bottle of beer in the freezer. upon noticing said item and delicately trying to extract it, the rice begins to boil over and/or burn as both the cell phone and house phone ring simultaneously. i was washing dishes and so my hands are wet. i really to get to my cell because it is the call i have been waiting for. but i was also in the process of retrieving marinated chicken from fridge because the grill is hot and flaming up outside. the doorbell rings: it is my oldest son who leaves the car running, but the house door is locked and i need to let him in.

oh wow. that open bowl of pico de gallo right at the tip of the fridge shelf falls onto the kitchen floor while retrieving the marinated chicken. here comes the dog to lap it up.

telemarketer calls again.

this whole scenario really did occur. i wanted to pull my hair out!

Last week, when going home from work, on the bicycle, i had to wait for an open (closed) bridge.
Some three ships had to pass, so it became quite crowdy with waiting bicyclists.
I decided to wait for all of them to ride off again (from both sides of the bridge they were starting) when the bridge was closed (open) again, i didn’t want to be in that crowdy web of left and right turning peddlers.
So, i was last in line.
After about hundred metres i almost crashed into another cyclist who came from the right.
Twenty metres further, when i had to pass a steady bridge over a canal, i nearly crashed into a van, which came from the right.
Hundred metres after the bridge i wanted to take another cyclist in (over?) and we touched bikes.
Then, for some hundreds of metres nothing happened.
When riding the street where my supermarket is, i thought of doing some groceries.
I ‘jumped’ onto the pavement, but my wheel hit the curbstones and i made strange, slapsticky movements, which made me uncontrolably go right at a pedestrian.
I missed him just.
We both laughed.
I thought nothing could go wrong anymore now, and i thought that more things would go wrong now, still.
The latter it was.
I didn’t took a basket with me, because i only needed some milk, bread and some candy and snacks.
The milk on top of the stack i already had in my hands wasn’t a good idea.
It fell.

So, nothing really happened, but it was the first time that i thought about that famous Murphy’s Law.
And what if i had decided to ride off immediately with all the other waiting cyclists?

Edit: If it qualifies me for the Keystone Cops i don’t know though.
Gonna look up what that is now.

Yesterday, jsut as my boss walked in the room I picked up an iMac and stood up straight (we have some frames hanging from the celing) hit my head on the frame then ducked down really fast as a reaction and bashed my chin into the iMac. Set the iMac down, turned around and hit my head on another frame all within 30 seconds. My boss was laughing his ass off.

@rottenit Me too! Just reading it. That’s what I’m talking about.

Nothing serial of late, but I did drop my brand new $250 cell phone in a glass of milk yesterday. Fortunately after drying out for 24+ hours it has finally started to function normally again. Next time I have a serial episode I’ll let you know….my life is a comedy of errors.

@dalepetrie Not what they had in mind in the “Everything goes better with milk” campaign. Bummer, I hope it continues to work.

@Marina – so far so good, though I can’t get the mini SD card to format.

I promised that my life is just a series of slapstick events separated by short periods of time, and boy can I deliver.

On Friday, late at night, my wife and I heard a loud noise. Kind of sounded like either something fell down in the upstairs of our house, or squirrels got into the walls. I looked around and didn’t see anything….my wife, told me to check our bedroom closet. I looked, nothing seemed amiss. Half an hour later we heard a crash that made the first crash sound sickly. She said check the closet again because that’s where it sounded like it was coming from. The shelf on which we had a ton of stuff stacked and the clothes hanger rod with tons of clothes on it (probably 10 feet long) all came crashing down.

Well, nothing was open that night, and we had plans Saturday, Sunday and Monday all day, my wife had to work Tuesday and this seemed like a 2 person job. Well Monday night we took all the clothes that were hanging and put them on an ironing board in the bedroom. Tuesday morning the ironing board tipped when no one was in the room. We righted all the clothes and stabilized the board, then this morning the ironing board collapsed. We left it and went to the hardware store, our first chance to do so since Friday to get what we needed…4 brackets, 4 bolts, 4 screws and some nails to put back a piece of wood that broke off one of the support areas. I nailed the board back in place, then went to look for my socket wrench, which is in a toolkit which had been in our kitchen forever. I spent hours looking for that damn toolkit, then when I was upstairs in the bathroom we never use changing the litter in a cat box we have up there (we never use the damn bathroom because I thought cats were supposed to be clean animals, but ours never got the memo and our bathroom floor is always covered in litter), I saw my tool kit. I have no fucking idea how it got there. I brought it downstairs and went to put in the bolts. My socket set wasn’t in there. So I placed the brackets in their places, tightened the bottom screws (which do nothing but stabilize really) and at least had them in place so the shelf, brackets and rod were up, but nothing was stable enough to hold clothes. I used my electric screwdriver to tighten these screws, but of course it ran out of juice and I pretty much had to use it like a regular screwdriver. I then set out to look for the socket wrench, found everything but, and then started looking for a screwdriver that I could use with my sockets. I could not find one, so I tried to use a regular wrench, but I couldn’t even get the bolt started. So I decided to put the extender on the socket I wanted to use, but I had to hammer it in, not sure why it’s so tight.

Anyway, I sat there, everything I needed but the wrench itself, and my wife promised to help me look for it, but of course we got in a fight about it (the second one of the day, the first one happened on the way to the hardware store…she’s in a bad mood because someone kicked in our garage door last night and stole just her bike, and I’m frustrated because I’ve been unemployed for 7 months and I can’t even seem to get a simple fucking home repair done, meanwhile while I have no cash to fix anything, that’s when everything seems to fall apart). So, she pm’d her brother to see if he and his boyfriend had a socket set, and they did so his bf brought it over.

By this time it’s now 10pm, so now that I finally have a socket wrench, the socket I want and the bolt ready to go in the socket, I went to put my socket on their wrench, but the connectors were the wrong size, so I had to find their ½ inch socket, which I did (but their socket kit was not at all organized, just a box of random parts). I went to the closet which still has shit all over the floor, making it hard to maneuver, and found out that the socket worked in the direction you’d go if you wanted to loosen something, but not in the direction you’d go if you wanted to tighten. So, I checked and they had a screwdriver, but I had to find a different ½ inch socket to use that, which I did. So, I used that to hand tighten the bolts…took me 10 times as long as a socket wrench would have, and gave me carpal tunnel (my wrist was already sore from some unknown injury a couple days ago).

Now, the first two brackets in the middle were no problem, but the ones at the edges required me to walk into the closet, which again was no easy task because of all the stuff from the shelf that was still on the floor. And of course what do I step on but a framed picture with glass, which fortunately was face down, meaning I didn’t cut myself, but I did have a mess to clean up. I get the third one in place and I go to the left to do the last one, and I meet some resistance in the board where I’m trying to put the bolt in. I push, but the bolt slips and falls into the abyss, I can’t find it. Well, I had only bought 4 bolts, but I managed to find one from the previous brackets after some more searching, so I tried that one, and that too fell out into the abyss. So, I finally said fuck it, gave up and hung the clothes back on the pole.

Tomorrow I hope to have time to take all the crap off the floor, find the bolts, and once the closet is cleaned out, I’ll walk into it and then hopefully I’ll be able to at least get that bolt started, so that if I find my socket wrench tomorrow I’ll be able to put that one in too.

Let’s just say, I’ll never be confused with a handy man unless you add the word capped in there.

lol4rl

That’s what I’m talking about, dp! Way to go. You too are an honorary member of my Keystone Kops club!

@Marina I’d say it should be the Keystone Kops Klub, but then you’d be stuck with an acronym with rather unpleasant konn connotations.

@MacBean I’m all for alliteration and spelling conformity, but KKK is not opportune as your point out.Perhaps a new name altogether. Ideas? Coordinated Comedy Club?