misjudged the jump

2022-12-18

The three of us are trying to take the elevator up to the top floors where we have our new offices.

The elevators are hard to figure out at first. We have to go all the down before we can start to go up. But we get there.

I don’t actually work here, so I’m getting the tour.

One of the office features is an open stairwell in the center with glass half walls so you can’t fall. But it seems to go all the way down to the bottom floor, which is dozens of floors below. The office spans two or three floors. And I start to wonder whether it would be possible to jump from here and kind of glide across the stairwell and land on the other side either 1 or 2 floors below.

I climb up on the glass wall and it’s really hard to get a good perch because the glass is thin, and there’s only a small amount of space between the ceiling and the top of the wall. But I feel like it’s possible to kind of roll forward and push off and launch yourself into the stairwell. I don’t do it though, because the other side is way too far away. There’s no way you can make it.

We talk our friend into trying it anyway though! He climbs up on top of the glass wall, and pauses to gather his courage. You can tell he’s nervous. And then he pushes off maybe twelve inches from the wall—which is probably ten or twelve feet short of the other side—and then just falls straight down the stairwell, screaming as he goes.

We laugh so hard that it’s hard to stand, and there are tears in my eyes. He’s going to splatter on the ground like a brown paper bag full of vegetable soup!

He’ll eventually reconstitute himself. It’ll be slow and painful. But he’ll be fine. He should have known better than to try, really. What a goober.