How could a work accident happen in a personal injury firm?

You'd think I'd have learned, in all this time working in the copy department for a personal injury solicitor firm, that I ought to be watching out for my own health and safety. But there I was, the other day, wobbling precariously close to a fall...

I should begin earlier than this. There's a crane over my desk - not a "pick up heavy things on a construction site" crane, a lucky origami one. I put it there the day I took up this desk, where it hangs by a treasury tag from one of those panel-grid ceilings. Given I folded it from an erroneously printed bit of work that would otherwise have been recycled, it should be doubly lucky out of gratitude, right?

Well... however long it's been suddenly appeared to be the extent of my luck, as I teetered on the edge of a swivel chair, suddenly aware of the distance between a head that's nearly touching the ceiling and a floor that seems hard enough to cause me a work accident or a personal injury like the ones I keep writing about.

The only reason I was up there was that one of the directors had finally noticed the bird. It's a white ceiling, and a white crane, but it must have just moved in the breeze as he went past. With guests for an important meeting about to walk into the office, I thought his comment meant that he wanted it removed.

And what is an obedient soul such as I to do in such a circumstance but this? I hopped onto my chair, ready to remove my crane to some more appropriate location, but while doing that, the director asked what it was for. For luck, I said, and he said that in that case we ought to keep it where it was. And then mentioned that I shouldn't be where I was, on an unstable swivelly chair, for all the usual health and safety reasons I really ought to know about.

I smiled, happy that the crane got to stay, and said that telling me to get down would probably count as appropriate training if I were to ask one of our own personal injury solicitors about making a compensation claim. He also smiled, and walked away toward the more glamorous end of the office.

And that's where we came in - it was in getting down that the wobble started. Perhaps relief, perhaps a gust of wind, perhaps I'm just not as gymnastic as I once was. But the vision of a nasty office fall zipped through me, and I found my arms doing the cartoon windmill thing to try to keep upright.

Fortunately, it worked - I'm here to write this, aren't I? I got back to upright, panting slightly, and noticed the rest of the office staring. Strange how you lose awareness of things that don't matter so much when you're involved in a work accident, or even in the process of narrowly avoiding one.

It's a relief not to be thinking about a compensation claim; I imagine no-one's harder to make a claim against than a firm of personal injury solicitors. But more than that, I'm relieved to have my almost-broken head intact.

Can I claim?