Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Schadenfreude!

Okay, stay with me on this one. There are several seemingly unrelated facts at the beginning of this story that you need to know. First of all, I got my hair cut during lunch today. And I was seated at the far end of the room in the last barber chair next to the wall (with the wall on my right). And while the lady was trimming my right sideburn, I noticed she had a bit of a cold or maybe allergies or something (don't worry, this isn't a gross-out story). So she sniffled occasionally and she sounded a little congested. Then she realized she needed to sneeze. So she used the appropriate retail-service-employee-shoulder-sneeze method. Then she came around to the left side and started cutting my hair on that side.

Then she felt another sneeze coming on and decided the more polite thing to do would be to go around the wall into the next room and sneeze there. The problem was that she had to close her eyes before she made it around the corner. And her sneeze came faster than she anticipated. So as she came to the corner, she sneezed into the brick wall.

And I want to be clear here. I'm not telling you that her sneeze hit the wall. I'm telling you that her face hit the wall… hard. So hard, in fact, that she had to take a break from cutting my hair to regain her composure before resuming. And she had a big red mark on her cheek when she came back.

Now I'm assuming it was the slightest bit of pity for her that kept me from laughing out loud. But it was one of the funniest things I've seen in my entire life. I had to sit there for another 15 minutes with that scene replaying in my head over and over again and not laugh at her. If you want to see it, check my YouTube channel. Okay, not really. I don't have a YouTube channel, and I can only wish I had the incident on tape. But if you want to imagine it correctly, just envision someone sneezing while jogging. And then add a brick wall directly in front of their face. I can't describe it any better than that. Oh! Maybe I can call the manager and request the security tape!

(Now go ahead and look up the title of this post. You'll understand its appropriateness now.)

3 comments:

Rory said...

2 things:
#1 Are you assuming we don't know what schadenfreude means?? :)

#2 You should do one of those re-enactment cartoons like the Chinese tv shows did of Tiger Woods' incident...just a thought.

Taylor said...

#1 I didn't know it until I posted this anecdote to my Facebook wall and someone left a comment with that word.

#2 I would, but my video editing "skillz" are limited to tagging people in Facebook video uploads.

Rory said...

So are you saying that your facebook friends get to hear stories before they hit the blog??? If so, how do I friend you?