27 March 2012

1, 2, 3, 4 EVERYBODY ON THE FLOOR - DAY 87


Its not every day that a complete stranger dives head first into the concrete that lies before you. Walking home in my post work daze last week, a 60 something year old took a tumble that saw him lying face down before me on Foveaux St. For some reason I thought he had died on the spot. How unfortunate that it was at my feet.

I fumbled for my iPhone while my colleague attended to the dead man. Naturally, in a crisis situation my phone wouldn’t work. Somehow the Optus connection wasn’t connecting, so I scored myself a big fat fail on providing emergency assistance in a crisis situation. In my second attempt to help, I decided it was extremely dangerous that he was lying on the road, so I decided to act as a human shield between the oncoming traffic and the dead man. Ironic seeing as he was already dead and there wasn’t too much damage they could possibly do. Internally I congratulated myself on choosing the orange sweater that day, a suitable colour for a human shield.

As the scene started to attract a nice crowd, I also pondered whether it was poor taste to make friends out of such an incident. I mean, these were the caring, proactive types I would like in my life anyway. Does it matter how I recruit them? My moment of heroism was rudely interrupted when death started to stir and my corpse woke up. Turns out he had fallen straight onto his head and knocked himself out cold. Funny that, it never occurred to me that he had passed out. The ambulance arrived and it seemed the right time to make a quiet escape. As I snuck off, stage left I heard him mutter “I did have a few drinks”. “That’s ok”, said the gay florist “at least you won’t feel anything!”