PowerGlue and I

I was fretting about more than usual for a presentation. The next day was my final presentation to be made before the entire creative department of the ad agency I was interning in – it was the decisive presentation for the grade the agency would give me. A chill ran down my spine every time I thought of the fat, funkily-bespectacled-rosary-on-his-neck creative head who was infamous for the way he graded the interns. I felt like I was going to my grave.

Everything had to be perfect for the d-day. I checked my formal suit for the umpteenth time and brushed the dust off the coat. My room mate laughed.
‘The suit might just rip apart for all the brushing you do!’ she joked.
I smiled at her courteously. Poor thing, she was trying to alleviate my tension. Nothing seemed to ease me, though.
I then went out and brought my only pair of black, formal shoes.
‘Nina, is this fine?’ I asked my room mate.
She carefully looked at the pair of shoes.
‘Hmm…should be good! Why don’t you try wearing it with the coat…so we could just check if they match?’
I put the shoes on, and wore the dull grey coat. They matched quite well.
Whew, at least this is fine, I thought.
I sashayed around a little bit. I was quite thrilled because this was the first time I was wearing the new suit. For an all-important occasion that too.

Then it happened. My clumsiness chose to show its head out, and I hit my leg hard against the leg of the cot. And fell down. And broke the heel of one of the shoes.
Suddenly everything was going wrong.
I groaned with pain, and after seeing the heel that just came off on my hand like a piece of cake, in agony. My face fell, and my head was swirling with pain, depression and anger.
Nina quickly came to the rescue. She helped me get on my feet and examined the broken heel.
‘No worries, we can fix it,’ she said.
I smiled, despite the smarting pain in my left leg. Smart, smart Nina. Nina who always had a solution at hand.
She quickly rummaged into her draw and brought out a tube of PowerGlue. ‘Really, sticks anything,’ she said.
We glued the heel and the part of the shoe which held the heel. It stuck. Stuck hard. I sighed with relief.

As I tried to put the shoe away, I realised something with horror. I mean, it was terrifying. Two of my fingers were stuck to the heel of the shoe we were trying to fix. Try as I might, I couldn’t pull it apart.
I cried out with a yelp of pain. I tried hard again as Nina tried to moisten the stuck fingertips with water to help them come out from the shoe.
Of course, it shouldn’t work, my mind told me. My presentation the next day has to get screwed up.
Fifteen minutes later, another girl and two other guys had tried to take the damned shoe apart so that my fingers would come off it. It didn’t help. I was almost getting used to having a shoe in my left hand. My mind was conjuring up scary images of me having to live with the shoe for life.

Then Vik decided it was time to go to the hospital. I freaked out, thinking of what they could possibly do to detach the shoe from my fingers.
‘No, Sarah,’ he told me. ‘That’s the only way!’
Reluctantly, I agreed. Of course, I can’t live with a shoe in my left hand forever.
It was 12:15 in the night. And five of us ran into the emergency section of the nearest hospital we could find.

It was the most embarrassing thing for me to show the doctor two fingers stuck ferociously to a heeled shoe (the heel was stuck well now, as you may know!). The doctor couldn’t control his smile as he saw a 22-year-old girl helplessly hiding her embarrassment while he examined the situation.
It took just 20 minutes for them to get the shoe off my fingers. I was in a daze when they were doing it, sweating profusely with fear for the presentation I had to make in another 9 hours.
When my fingers were finally free, I didn’t even realise it. Nina had helped me on to bed in the room, and I had just dozed off in a daze again. When I awoke the next morning, I saw a plaster covering my ring and middle fingers. I decided to be nice and didn’t curse the damned black shoe or the glue that had caused so much trouble.

I went to my office, well dressed, confident and prepared. After all, nothing could go terribly wrong, isn’t it?
Well, it happens that day wasn’t really my day. 7 minutes before the presentation, as I was pacing the corridors of the conference hall in heights of anxiety, the heel of the right shoe broke off.
‘Damn you!!!’ I screamed with all anger I could muster. Tony, my co-intern, came in running from the next room.
‘Sarah…is anything wro-?’ he began to ask and paused, as I bitterly held the heel of the other shoe in my hand. God, I thought, what more?!

‘Ah, dear…that’s no problem, I’ll fix it for you in a jiffy…just wait right here,’ said Tony and ran to his desk.
He came back in a minute holding a little tube which he gave me, saying, ‘Sticks anything, you know?’
I took the tube from him.
PowerGlue.
‘Oh yeah, I know,’ I told him. And put the tube away, muttering the most random excuse that came into my mind for not using it.

The presentation actually went well. Except of course, the frequent stares my shoeless-stockinged barefoot legs got from time to time from the creative head and most of the other people. I’m waiting for my evaluation.