High-impact brush with kartma

You know those incredibly embarrassing, asinine things that happen to your friends? You make… You know those incredibly embarrassing, asinine things that happen to your friends? You make fun of them about it forever because it didn’t happen to you.

Yeah, those incredibly embarrassing, asinine things can happen to you, too.

About a week before Christmas, a bunch of my bar co-workers met up in the South Side for a holiday bar crawl. Now, with the exception of myself, bar workers can typically drink like old Irish men on St. Patrick’s Day – only they can do it every single day of the year.

Thus, we meet up at our first stop and I start out the evening pacing myself, because I learned the hard way that I can’t keep up with these guys and gals. About a half hour or so into the night everyone decides to move on to the next destination. We walk outside, only to find a shopping cart right in front of the bar.

One of my friends is feeling pretty good at this point, and she decides to climb into the cart. I decide that it would be funny to push the drunk girl down the sidewalk in the shopping cart. So we take off, both laughing gleefully as we make our way down East Carson Street.

Keep in mind that my boss, his sons and my managers are directly behind us, laughing at the spectacle. As we go down a small ramp onto a side street I could see that there was a similar little ramp up to the next sidewalk. Since there was no curb that I could see hindering us, it only seemed right that we should pick up some speed as we approached the next sidewalk.

I began a full out run, pushing the cart with all my might, and although I can hear my boss and managers yelling for me to slow down because of the curb, I know that they don’t have the same view of the ramp as I do, so I keep running. That’s about when we hit the curb head on.

As my friend flies out of the shopping cart, her coat catches the corner of it, and she pulls the cart down on its side, taking me along with it.

I fall flat on my face, hitting my mouth and chin off the curb and rolling out into the street. At this point I’m still laughing. I continue laughing until my boss helps me up and I immediately see a look of terror spread across all of my co-workers’ faces.

I look down to see that I’ve ripped a hole in one knee of my jeans and also ripped my knee up pretty badly. I also apparently scraped my entire chin and – to top things off – chipped a tooth, and it was only about 9:30 in the evening.

What happened to the drunk girl in the shopping cart, you ask? Nothing. She came out of it with barely a scratch. It was her stupid idea to get in the shopping cart in the first place. Come on, someone had to push her. I was basically acting on instinct.

So did I call it a night and head home to cry in my bed? No way. I hung in there for the remainder of the evening, making it to the last stop and closing down our bar in the South Side. I even posed for pictures with the equally bumped and bruised bar back who had fallen down the steps a few days earlier.

Luckily, my boss was able to get me in to see his dentist the next morning and the chipped tooth was fixed. Don’t ask me which one was chipped, because if you can’t tell, I’m not telling. But I did have to endure being home for the holidays with a huge scrape on my chin and a limp from my knee. Try explaining that one when you’re at the mall and you run into everyone from high school that you haven’t seen in years.

Now, I think this may have been a little bit of karma coming back around my way. That bar back I mentioned earlier? Yeah, I had pretty much teased him mercilessly for falling down the steps at work. In fact, I was somewhat unrelenting. He had taken it all in stride, laughing at my jabs.

Even though I didn’t deserve it, he was one of the first to console me after my face met the pavement. He stuck by my side at the end of the evening and made sure none of the drunks picked on me.

So, don’t dish it out if you can’t take it coming right back at you. Or you might be scarred with a fear of shopping carts for the rest of your life.

Share your cart race stories with Jessica at jrp32@pitt.edu.