This humorous essay was written by a PSC student and board member for an English class she took last semester at Los Medanos College.
Mistakes Essay
Mistakes, who me? Yes, I honestly must say I have made a lot of mistakes in my life, but the mistake that takes the cake happened in the year 2000. During the Thanksgiving holiday our tradition is to decorate the Christmas tree the day after. But, due to the fact I had been diagnosed with colon and bowel cancer three years earlier, we had stopped that tradition. For some reason in 2000, I wanted to restart the tradition and decorate the tree the day after Thanksgiving. After making that decision, I asked my loving husband to get the tree down from the loft in the garage before he left for work on Friday. He told me that he would get it down on Saturday, his day off, but I insisted I wanted it done that day, the Friday after Thanksgiving. Guess what, he left for work Friday morning with the tree still in the garage loft. So, I decided I would do the job myself. Around 7:00 A.M. I got up, pulled out the ladder and climbed up into the loft. Now, how hard was that? The tree was right there. I pushed the tree to the edge of the loft and shoved it over. To my surprise, the box clipped the corner of the ladder and both went tumbling down.
“Lord, You said that You are a very present help in times of trouble” was the thought that went through my mind as I was looking up to Heaven and then down at the mess I was in. How was I going to get down from there? The first thing I saw looking around was an old refrigerator standing beneath one side of the loft. Reaching down, I was able to open up the freezer part and attempted to use the freezer shelf as a step to get down. When I started putting weight on the shelf, I felt it give and thought that it would fall over if I put more weight on it. So, I cancelled that idea. I next decided to push off as many boxes as I could to make a cushion on the concrete floor that I could jump onto. Before jumping, I looked down and still felt that it was too high for me to jump or hang drop down onto. Looking around for yet another way down, I spotted my husband’s walking staff. Using the staff as a pole, with the help of the door-jam, I was able to slowly shimmy down the wall. From start to finish, this fiasco took well over three hours. Needless to say, after all that the tree still never got put up on Friday.
This mistake could be classified as either a stupid or a simple mistake. Being that I don’t want to look stupid, I am classifying it as a simple and honest mistake. It is simple because it could have easily been avoided if I would have just waited one more day for my husband to get the tree down, or been more careful when pushing it off the loft’s edge. I made it a stupid mistake because I was impatient and did not pay attention to what I was doing when I pushed the tree off the loft’s edge with the ladder in tow. This is not an involved or complex mistake because first there was no effort in preventing the mistake and second, it could have been easily prevented by me not going up there in the first place. From this mishap, I learned that the loft is off limits to me and I have never gone up to the loft again. Now, I wait until someone can safely get the tree down for me.