So I'm on a conference call in the confines of my own home office. I am not a necessary piece of this particular call, so I look around for something to quietly occupy my time with. I see a tape measure. At the time, my home office had vaulted ceilings. I decided to see how far up I could send the tape measure before it bent under it's own weight.

Slowly and quietly I worked it. Growing by feet at first, by an inch or two at the tail end because it just seemed so unstable. In the process, I didn't realize it, but I had leaned back in my chair pretty much as far as I could. I guess it was helping me balance, who knows. This is maybe 45 minutes into a telephone meeting that I had not participated in at all. Then someone says something along the lines of "my_name has that data. Hey, my_name, could you build some sort of report?"

Your instinct when someone says your name after you have been slacking off for quite some time is to sit up straight. I tried. Then all hell broke loose. Of course the tape measure bent. It fell right on top of a very heavy vase that was sitting on top of a hutch. That vase fell over and crashed, making all kinds of noise and bringing some books, nick nacks, and whatever other crazy shit was lying around with it. Of course, instead of sitting up, I end up falling over backwards. I tried to stand up, but I was wearing a wired headset and that wire was now under the chair, so I let out a yelp as my head slammed back into the ground. Of course, my next instinct was to knock a few more things over while getting up and swear.

So after a solid 5 seconds of crashing and swearing, I picked up the headset and said "Yes, I can do that report. No problem."

"What happened over there?!?"

"Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh... everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you... How are you?"