The other day, while getting full-body animated trying to explain pillow basalt formation on the ocean floor, I got my shoe caught in my mic cord. Since the cord only extends from my left lapel to my right back pocket, I cannot really explain how this happened. What I do know is that suddenly finding one foot trapped up near your waist while bouncing around on one high heel is not a classy look. Thanks to the cloud of small miracles that seems to surround me and prevent complete destruction when something like this goes awry, I did NOT actually catapult semi-hogtied into the stands, nor did I actually finish dropping to the floor. For my students, I imagine it was something like this:
I eventually extricated my foot and spent the next few seconds simultaneously lecturing and bending the mic clip back into a shape that would actually attach to my shirt, since it somehow got seriously warped during my graceful performance. To my credit, I didn't skip a beat.
I'm fairly certain that my teaching reviews will go up the day I finally bite it in front of the room. Until then, I now have a student assigned to call campus safety if/when I do go down; I like to think of it as insurance against the inevitable.
