Stairway to Limbo

So... yesterday I had agreed to meet with my teacher and talk about stuff at 10am.

So I thought I'd work on this blog, pray, sleep, what have you and wake up at 9am - reasonable enough because my uni is a five to seven minute walk away.

I woke up at 10:15 am.

So I was running late - I could run, assuming I had the energy, that sort of thing. I leapt into my pants, not eating even a small scrap of food for energy, still wiping the sleep from my throbbing eyes. I ran to the elevators.

Now I live in the 16th floor. That's quite high up considering the space between floors. The wait for the elevators wouldn't be much of a problem, since there are three elevators in my building, and from my mental estimates a ride would be available within, say, 90 seconds. That's enough time.

The elevators weren't working.

It wasn't just one elevator, or two. I'd experienced that before. This time, it was all three. With time running out, I decided to bolt for the fire escape. It was the only way to get off the building, barring jumping out of the window - and I'm not aerodynamic.

The steps on the fire escape would snugly fit a size 7 shoe. I'm a size 13, and more than one time I was in danger of tripping and falling down the stairs and breaking my neck. But since I'm here typing this, that thankfully didn't happen.

A note about the fire escape stairs before we go to the next plot point - in between floors there are two flights of stairs. You see the exit, say, to the 15th floor, you go down two flights of stairs and you can see the exit to the 14th floor.

At around the third floor, I go down two flights of stairs and I see nothing. That's normal, since the building curiously does not have a second floor.

But after going down at least three more consecutive flights of stairs and see nothing, I get a little scared. What if this stairway was connected to some evil limbo dimension and I'd be climbing down stairs forever?

Thankfully, I got out. It was 10:25. The moment I bolted out of that door at the ground floor, I saw the elevators were working. Dammit.

I ran like hell to school. Almost every component of my lower extremities were hurting like mad, lactic acid was overwhelming my system, my knees were trembling and it wasn't because of luu-huuu-huuve. Thank God I didn't have to go up any stairs (well, maybe one or two flights) or I would probably be dead from a heart attack.

I arrived at the meeting place; it was around 10:30.

When I got to school, I was told the teacher I was scheduled to talk to had moved our meeting to 11am.

Whee!

That said, I ate at Burger King for lunch.