h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

When I was a bachelor, living on my own, I decided to move a large settee from the bedroom down the stairs to the living room. Of course I didn't bother to get a couple of mates round to help me - I mean... "How hard can it be?"...

So I worked slowly and methodically and managed to get it out of the bedroom. I got it round the corner at the top of the stairs. It was all going 'swimmingly'. Clearly I was perfectly justified in trying to do this myself. And then my next move left me hanging onto one short wooden leg of the sofa - the sofa itself trying to pull me down the stairs. At this point I had intended to be below the sofa, trying to control its descent. But no; I was above it and even if I wanted to ask for help - the phone was downstairs too. My only choice (other than to be dragged downstairs by the settee) was to let go!

So I did.

CRASH!!!!

Well it didn't break anything. And I was unhurt.
But it was a stupid way of doing it.

I once did the same with a very large table. Fortunately the top bit came off leaving a large square top which meant that the table was as tall as it was wide as it was long. The table is very solid and very heavy, but I thought, I'm young, I'm fit (I still get deluded now) and it's only one flight of stairs...

I then attempted to get it up the stairs (by myself). It was only when I got past the banisters half way up that I realised that the width of the table was only about 1cm less than the available space, and didn't really leave a lot of room for my fingers.... Progress got very slow from this point on and I was still there about twenty minutes later, about four steps further on and still five steps from the top. By now I was completely knackered, but I couldn't let go of the table (like you did) because I was on the down side of it, and would have been instantly crushed by the thing. In the end I had to put it down and lean against it for about half an hour before I could get the strength together to manage those last few steps.

I don't think I did a lot more that night....

In a similar vein, though slightly different, I managed to get a travel cot jammed in our stairway almost irreversibly.

I was carrying this thing upstairs and it decided to open up midway, like a large heavy four-legged ungainly spider, with legs wedged through the banisters gaps. Rather than stop and refold the thing I decided to continue pushing in the hope that this would somehow free the thing up, but all it did was to get it even more stuck.

Eventually I ran out of energy and just left it midway up the stairs to deal with (much) later. In the meantime we had to climb over it every time we wanted to go up or down.