An Unfortunate Series Of Events

I will impart to you a tale of a five-second span of time that took place around 10 AM this morning while on my work site. The events that occurred during aforementioned time span...to put it lightly, they sucked.

First, some background. We are at the stage of construction during which the primary focus of the volunteer crews is to measure, cut, and install the siding on the house. Before the entirety of the walls can be finished, however, the windows in said walls have to be furnished with trim (small pieces of 1x4 that surround the window frame) and a shaped piece of wood that diverts the rain from the top of the trim. That was my task this morning: cut the shaped wood to size and nail it to the top of the trim. This required that I spent time atop an A-frame ladder...nothing that I haven't done many times before. Simple enough.

Last night, however, it rained quite a bit. This would not matter, were it not for the large amounts of mud that surround our site. It ends up everywhere; on the porch, on the trim...and on the ladders. Therein lies the root of the problem, and thus began one of the more unsuccessful five-second segments of my life.

It began with a misguided hammer swing. As anybody who has ever done any nailing before, this is not an uncommon event. Even the professionals miss from time to time. I missed with the hammer, and smacked the piece of shaped wood. It is not a large or sturdy thing, though, so one end cracked off. This was annoying, but still nothing overly serious; when dealing with volunteers (and the occasional stupid Americorps member like myself), one learns quickly to keep extras of everything on hand. I swore and started down the ladder to cut another piece, and it went downhill from there. I had gone two steps downward when I slipped on a chunk of mud on one of the ladder rungs. My feet went out from under me and I dropped about three feet, scaring myself quite badly in the process. My right foot landed oddly against a rock, sending my ankle in the wrong direction. This threw me off balance and I stumbled backwards, cracking my head quite hard against the side of the house. That terrible head-impact feeling of swimming came over me and I attempted to re-orient myself...when the ladder hit me. You see, when I was first falling off the ladder, I unsuccessfully tried to steady myself by grabbing the side of it. Upon landing, there was JUST enough of a pull on the ladder to spur it into a slow but definite descent...which ended when it smacked off my right shoulder and clattered to the ground.

At that point, I was done. In five seconds I had succeeded in not only scared the shit out of myself and dealt significant pain to my foot, ankle, head, and shoulder...but I had FAILED to install the rain-diverting wood as I had intended.

It was not a good day.