Jackie Falls
Off Chair

The air in the office was stale that fateful afternoon of October 20, 2021. The clock ticked toward destiny, though none of us—least of all Jackie—knew it. To the untrained eye, it was just another Wednesday. But the universe, in its infinite chaotic humor, was about to rewrite the laws of physics. Jackie approached the chair with the swagger of a woman who had successfully sat down thousands of times before. There was no hesitation in her stride, no tremble in her knee. Witnesses would later testify that her confidence was her hubris. She moved with the assuredness of a captain taking the helm, blind to the iceberg awaiting her. "T-minus five seconds," the silent countdown began in the ether. She began the descent. It is a motion we take for granted, a simple bending of the knees, a trust fall with furniture. But on this day, the coordinates were wrong. A critical error in trajectory estimation occurred. Perhaps the chair had shifted millimeters to the left; perhaps the rotation of the Earth had accelerated just enough to throw off her center of gravity. Or perhaps science may never know. At T-minus zero, the unthinkable happened. Instead of the welcoming embrace of cushioned upholstery, Jackie met the cold, unforgiving betrayal of thin air. There was a moment—a fraction of a second suspended in time—where she hovered, a coyote running off a cliff, realizing too late that the ground was gone. Her eyes went wide, panic seizing her soul as the realization dawned: The chair is not there... Then, gravity claimed its due. CRASH! The impact shook the very foundations of our morale. Jackie lay upon the dirty office carpet, a fallen angel in a crumpled heap. The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by the ghostly, imagined strains of Sarah McLachlan’s "Angel" weeping through the air conditioning vents. A camera shutter clicked. It was the shot heard 'round the breakroom. In that split second, immortalized in high definition, Jackie was no longer just a coworker; she was a monument to human fallibility. She was the face of the "World's Foremost Chair Incident website." "Why does this exist?" she would later plead, her voice trembling with the weight of eternal embarrassment. "I've learned my lesson. I sit properly now. PLEASE." But it was too late. The "Make it Rain" button had been pressed. The Taco Bell donations had begun to flow. The Cloudflare servers were already caching her tragedy at edge locations worldwide. Jackie had not just fallen onto the floor; she had fallen into legend. And somewhere, in the quiet corner of the office, the chair sat empty — an innocent bystander in a tragedy of errors, whispering to anyone who would listen: "I was right here. All she had to do was sit."