Minisode: Two Tales of Broken Furniture

Awhile back I’d mentioned having a couple hilarious stories about breaking shit, and our listeners were totally into the idea of laughing at these potentially-humiliating experiences. FINALLY THE TALES ARE TOLD.

This is basically raw audio, so enjoy a fatcast that is even less edited than usual.

10 Responses to “Minisode: Two Tales of Broken Furniture”

  1. Kris Says:

    Last year, I broke the toilet seat at a friend’s apartment. I guess it wasn’t attached very securely, and it sort of swiveled on its hinge when I sat down. The edge that was no longer supported by the bowl cracked off. Loudly. So I had to finish my business kind of squatting (the way so many women do in public restrooms) to prevent further breakage. My friend was having a small party, so when I came out some wondered what the noise had been. I had to tell everyone that the toilet seat was broken. I offered to pay for a replacement, but my kind host shrugged it off. I tried not to be completely humiliated, but wasn’t really in a fat-accepting head space then. Thankfully most of the people there were good friends and nobody was mean about it. I live in South Korea, and for some reason a lot of the toilet seats here (especially the ones installed by cheap landlords) are much thinner than most seem to be in the U.S. I have to say that toilet seats were never something I thought of as unstable (unlike chairs and other furniture) until I came here.

  2. clownremover Says:

    I had an incident at an 8th grade pool party. I was starting to get tween/teen body issues and was already self conscious about being the chubby girl in the swimsuit, but I was having a pretty good time. I got out of the pool and went to sit down on a deck chair, one of those ones popular in the late 70’s and 80’s that were aluminum tubes held together with vinyl straps, which were already pretty old even then. When I sat down in the chair some of the vinyl straps popped out from under my butt, and when I tried to get out of the chair the whole thing collapsed under me. Everybody saw of course, and being kids did what kids do and laughed. I was pretty chock-full of tween mortification by this time and tried to flee the scene, but got yelled at by the assistant principal (who was chaperon) for leaving the broken chair there and not cleaning it up, so he made me go back and pick up the broken chair pieces. Thus began my irrational fear of pool furniture.

  3. Merry Says:

    I loved this discussion, could so relate to furniture malfunctions and how those are perceived (often incorrectly) as related to weight issues. It’s so nice to know I am not alone in these experiences. You both have a great sense of humor and I really appreciate that.

  4. Roxarita Says:

    I love this so much! I hope it becomes a regular thing with user submissions. I am also interested in tales where you just.can’t.fit because this idea is so subconsciously bothersome to me that when I was younger I regularly had dreams where I would get stuck somewhere because I was too big – like I could get in, but couldn’t get out, or everyone hopped through this break in a wall to escape but I couldn’t fit because of my size. It’s like restaurant booth anxiety in dream form!

    Actually, I was just marveling at the fact that I haven’t ever really broken anything when I saw the first comment and I have TOTALLY broken a toilet seat, but it was my own so it’s not as great a story. And then I remembered that I was in Target last week looking for lawn furniture and plopped down in one of those plastic fake adirondack chairs and the things just BENDED TO THE WILL OF MY ASS. The legs just started to slide out much like Lesley’s story (it didn’t actually break). It’s totally one of those moments where if it had just been my girlfriend and I we would have been like, oh, well, we don’t want that chair! But there were all these PEOPLE around and some were TEENAGE GIRLS and there was that twinge of mortification I hadn’t felt in a long time.

  5. burrburr Says:

    SIMILAR STORY TIME!!! About a month or two ago, me and my boyfriend broke two of the solid steel legs on my bed frame at once, the two on the end of the bed, so in one big unf, we were suddenly boning at like a 45 degree angle! After a quick assessment of where our three cats were (none squished under us, thank goodness), we also continued our copulation. Afterwords we joked that we were going to have to buy a bed frame made of DIAMONDS because apparently solid steel isn’t strong enough to handle our fat lovin’.

  6. LizaLou Says:

    This is hilarious. Thank you so much for sharing.

    I have a couple of broken stuff stories. The first is boring… broke my couch. But I have to say, getting it repaired was really easy and the guy who did it was fat and after he was done we both sat down on it, and I haven’t had any problems since.

    The second story requires a little background. My career is based around examining and determining causes of broken metal components… mostly bolts and gears and stuff like that.
    So, I am a large busted fatty and prefer wearing underwire bras and on more than one occasion, I have snapped that poor, tired underwire. Imagine my glee when I investigate my own bra failure and find prefect signs of fatigue. Fatigue is repeatedly loading an object causing it to bend and then break. Take a paperclip and bend it back and forth until it breaks… same thing.

    I know it’s not furniture, but I thought it was funny, as did most of the friends and coworkers that I told.

  7. jen Says:

    I loved Lesley’s platform bed story. It’s good to know that I’m not alone in that department.

    When my husband and I were dating, we once had a wild idea to use the weight bench for something other than its intended purpose. (For illustrative purposes, it resembled something similar to this http://www.ironcompany.com/ProductImages/marcy/204bench-lg.jpg). All of a sudden, en flagrante and all, and the upper part of the bench that was horizontal decides to give out.

    While physics and my husband attest to the following action happening in seconds, time really seemed to slow down as I had the split-second realization, “oh hey I’m suddenly sliding backwards at a very fast pace [expletive][expletive]”. The bench was slippery, and it was seriously like going down a slide buttnaked and headfirst. My backwards and downwards motion came to an abrupt stop when the top of my head crashed into the bottom of the couch (which was stupidly positioned behind said weight bench).

    We couldn’t continue. My boyfriend was laughing so hard at the ridiculousness of it, and once my embarrassment wore off, I chuckled about it too.

  8. Kristin Says:

    I also have broken a bed mid-sex with my then-boyfriend who was also fat. To be fair I think it was, uhm, the force of his thrusting motion that actually broke the legs of my bed and not really our extreme fatty-fatness, but it was fairly hilarious. Now I have a metal bedframe and no problems with my current lovah 🙂

  9. Katryn Says:

    I had the interesting experience of recently being apologized to by my former college boyfriend (12 years later) for making fun of me for once bursting a Moroccan pouf he had (like this: http://www.justmorocco.com/pd-moroccan-pouf.cfm).

    Even though it was one of my most humiliating memories, I was surprised that he remembered it. I’m still not sure how I feel about his apology, in which he acknowledged that it could have happened to anyone there and that it was just unfortunate that I was the fattest person there.

    On the one hand, I appreciated his sincerity, but on the other, it always shocks me to realize that other people are aware of or bothered by my fatness. Even at that age, when I was filled with self-loathing, I still kind of thought that it was all in my head and if I just didn’t talk about it, other people wouldn’t notice…

  10. arcane_scholar Says:

    I am not really worried about breaking stuff around friends and family, or in social situations. However, I am mortified by the idea of being out in public and doing it. For instance, at a restaurant. What do I do if I break a chair? Should I offer to pay for it? What if the manager tries to charge me a “fat tax”? Or what if I’m in the dressing room of a clothing store?

    In those situations, I’m not even sure I would be able to think clearly about how I was being treated because I would be too busy just trying to get out of there and not be publicly embarrassed. What sort of protocol should the managers/owners use in these situations?

Leave a Reply