This actually happened to me last weekend but I was to chagrined to post about it. Time heals all wounds though so it’s time to fess up.

I needed new sneakers. 2 years on the old timberlands and they were ready to give up the ghost, so last Saturday I headed off to the mall. After trying a couple of places I settled on a pair of Merrell’s . The only problem was I needed a pair in size 9.5, and the only pair in that size was way up on a high shelf above the shoe display, at least 5-6 feet over my head. I did a couple of laps around the store trying to locate a clerk but the only one I found was engaged with a family with kids, tracking down shoes for at least 3 kids and the Dad of the family. I’m not a patient man. I had noticed where the clerk stashed his stepladder so I snarfed it and headed back to my aisle. Unfortunately even on the stepladder, the shoebox I wanted was still just slightly out of reach. I decided I would try yanking quickly on the column with my pair of shoes in it, the idea being to grab the whole column, maybe 10-12 boxes of shoes. As I did this the whole wall of shoes started teetering, about to fall on my head. My instincts took over and I slapped both hands against the wall of shoeboxes, which settled them back in, all but the column of shoes I had been trying to pull out that is – this proceeded to fall in a jumble. Worse, though, was the fact that I fell off the ladder, landing awkwardly on my ankle and spraining it badly. I did manage to catch over half the falling boxes of shoes, but the rest made a huge clatter as they fell across the aisle.

Amazingly no one noticed this aside from the clerk, who came over in a rush from an adjacent aisle after hearing the crash, but by the time he got to me I had managed to push the ladder out of sight behind a rack, and had stuffed the fallen shoeboxes under a bench. I escaped without public humiliation at least, though a week and a day later my ankle is still sprained enough that I can’t run on it and it’s swollen up the size of a baseball. I do like the new sneaks though, so that’s something 😉