Difficulty with Stairs/Escalators

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I have trouble walking up and down stairs because of osteoarthritis in my knees that I developed when I was younger. And I'm not used to escalators since there aren't any buildings where I live that have them. But I heard at least one horror story about a girl who got her foot caught and mutilated by an escalator. When my mother and I went to the multi level malls in Halifax when I was a teenager I was especially scared of them.

I don't think that I have ever been on more than about five escalators in my life.

I did have problem with one of them, once, but not what you would think.

The president of a company in which I was the fifth largest stockholder and I went to do a presentation to one of the most powerful former corporate CEOs in the state who was considered, even retired, to be a major kingmaker in the state -- he was so much pull that he could call up a cabinet secretary and get a personal return call from the secretary within a few hours to a day.

We were trying to save our company. Neither of us were getting paid and the office was closed down. We were keeping the office equipment and furniture in my garage. And the computers, one PC and one DEC (Digital Equipment Company) VAX, in my house.

The former CEO had an office in the building which he went to just about every day. He didn't just sit around after retiring from the largest and most powerful company in that city -- he was on several major corporate boards and the boards of civic organizations.

And in walking into his building, you went up an escalator to the second floor. There were elevators, but they were hard to find.

For our presentation, we needed a computer. This was in 1992 and while the company would have had a number of computers, executives then would not normally have one in their offices. So we had to bring one with us. We packed it up. We made it up the escalator easy enough with me carrying the monitor and the president of the company carrying the computer packed up in the box it originally came in and sitting on a dolly. After the presentation, we boxed it back up and when we were ready to leave, we agreed that I would carry the monitor down and come back up to help with the computer.

So I started down the escalator. When I was near the bottom, I heard this loud boom, boom, boom behind me and I knew what it was without turning around. As soon as I got to the bottom, I stepped to the side and immediately afterwards, the dolly with the computer passed me. I only beat it by a second or less.

The president of the company was pretty embarrassed about it. I looked over it carefully and could see that the plastic case for the computer was missing a big chunk out of one corner.

We didn't say anything until we were nearly to my house when the president said simply, "I really thought I could make it without help."

Once we got home, we carried it in. The president of the company went home and I hooked it all up, expecting the worst. It actually still ran even though there was a huge hole in the upper rear right hand corner.

I never had much trouble with stairs, but I don't like steep stairs. That goes double if there are no handrails. That described the stairs at home that I had to go up and down for years. When I was real young, I had a playpen and spent all my time in there. Once they took me out of the play pen, my first bedroom was a cot stretched out in a storeroom upstairs. The cot was about five feet long and just barely fit in the closet with about two feet to one side to move around.

I never did fall down the stairs, though. There were a couple of times that I could have, but those were when I was older and came home drunk.

One neighbor family (about two miles away) had two sons and they had an upstairs bedroom. The bedroom was large, but there was one problem. The only stairs were outside. To get in and out by stairs, you had to walk through a door on the north side of the house, down the steps going west, and then around to the front of the house in the east and go in through the front door. That wasn't very good much of the year, especially in the winter time or when it was raining, so they had another method. There was a ladder built into the wall in the hallway. They would climb the ladder, open the trap door, climb into the room, and close the trap door behind them.

While I was in high school, the family added a large room to the north side of the house so that the stairway was no longer outside. They made that room addition into their new living room. I think that the old living room became a bedroom for one or two of their daughters.

One other thing about stairs. One local family has a spiral staircase to go upstairs to a kind of an upstairs den.

I always find it quite discomfortable to go up the stairs because of the way you have to keep turning as you go up. I used to like the idea of spiral stairs in theory, but once I tried them out, I quickly came to loath them.

Does anyone else here have issues with spiral staircases?

My mums unit had a spiral staircase. I was ok with it but I watched her take a tumble down them. Shag pile on the treads... Sheesh.
I didn't like the variable tread/riser ratio according to radius.

I fell down the stairs last night.

I thought I was going to be really sore today, but I feel okay.

The problem for me isn’t so much about stairs but just being clumsy in general.

Ouch!

I remember falling down stairs once, but it was only the last step in the dark. The light was burned out.

One time on the same staircase, I was walking down it in the dark. When I got to the bottom, my younger brother's dog (a really talented German Shorthair) started down, missed the second or third step coming down, and rolled the rest of the way. She seemed okay.

One day I was in the office working and I heard some racket behind me. I turned around and saw the same dog hanging from the suspended ceiling. She had fallen through the tiles and was just barely hanging on.

Within about three days of a year later, she did the same thing again. This time she fell on top of some fragile and hard to replace equipment but it still worked afterwards.

And then there was the time she carjacked a pickup driving down the street! She stopped a pickup, got the driver to open the door, jumped in, and absolutely refused to get out.

She was a very talented dog.