ass cast

Sometimes helping people backfires on me.

There's a woman in the office who's on crutches because she broke her ankle. The crutches were not adjusted correctly and so when she walked by my cube on Thursday I offered to fix them for her. She was really happy and kept thanking me.

The guy who's in charge of a major part of the business I'm consulting for came out of his office while that was going on and asked how I knew how to fix the crutches. I explained that I've spent over two years of my life on crutches. He asked why and I told him about my knee.

So he said "I'm having problems with my knee" and he walked into my cube and pulled his pant leg up. I immediately spotted swelling on the medial side of his knee and said "that looks like a tendon issue". I told him to see if the swollen area felt like a rubber band. He said he couldn't tell and asked me to feel it. So I did and decided he had damaged his PCL.

He went to the doctor's on Friday and it turns out I was right. In exchange, he said, for me helping him (I didn't actually do anything) he offered to make me a custom carbon fiber bike seat. Turns out he races bikes. I thought it was a nice thing to offer but told him it wasn't necessary. He said that he could make the seat for less than $15 (he has a company on the side and sells the seats on the web). All I had to do, he said, was let him make a clay cast of my ass, and then he would wrap it in carbon fiber and I would have a bike seat that weighs only 30 grams (most expensive seats weigh 150 grams).

I was like "um, no thanks" and he said "but it will be so much more comfortable" and I said "but I like being uncomfortable".

Hopefully he won't take that as permission to continue to bother me with weird offers like making an ass cast.