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I am remarkably clumsy and manage to do some things that always seem good in theory, but turn out badly. I’ve always been that way. As a little girl, I had the wild idea to see if my head would fit between the “X” shaped legs of my Fisher Price ironing board. It did. But of course, it was not as easy to remove. I remember running into the living room like a small hammerhead shark with the plastic ironing board around my neck and screaming that I would never be able to get it off.

When I was a little older, I remember climbing a chain link fence to play in my neighbor’s yard, but somehow got my shorts caught on the top and had to scream for a grown up to get me off the fence. In elementary school, I managed to run smack into a tree while playing tag. In my defense, I had to turn around to see if they were getting closer and the tree came out of nowhere. Really. On a rainy winter day in high school, I was walking out to the car when I slipped and flew into the air landing my very bony behind on the cold, wet concrete. Several football players rushed over to see if I was ok, and I could only respond by laughing hysterically to mask my complete clumsiness.

I’ve always hoped my clumsiness would gradually improve with age. It hasn’t.

It turns out that a lot of people are like me. It also seems that the office setting exaggerates good-in-theory ideas and clumsiness. I personally would like to think it’s because we’re being deprived sunlight as we sit in our sad, gray boxes called cubicles. Deep down, I know that’s probably not the case. As if anything can top my aforementioned personal blunders, here are a couple snapshots from my version of The Office.

One Friday, one of my co-workers was diligently editing pages for our new issue. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this process, said co-worker is given stacks of pages to read through and mark for mistakes prior to going to press. Getting overzealous with the process, she managed to get too close to the paper and drew blood thanks to a self-inflicted paper cut on her lip. Lucky for us, she caught herself before her lip bled all over 225.

Although we happen to be in the media, we lack inter-office communication. Well, with the exception of iChat, Apple’s instant messaging software. So, most of us listen to our iPods or iTunes for much of our eight hours in the office. I recently found some headphones to save myself from the deafening silence. The problem is that my headphones have to be plugged into the back of the hard drive, which is under my desk. The headphone cord is short, so this prevents me from moving at all. Any movement has either 1) tangled the blasted headphones in my earrings or 2) ripped the headphones from one of my ears. When mixed, those two have been known to trigger an interesting squeal and moderate earlobe discomfort.

My desk has an attached filing cabinet on the left. Apparently, the steady dose of sugar I nibble on affects my short-term memory because I ram my knee into it just about every time I turn the chair around. It’s gotten to the point where I usually don’t notice it except when people ask where the bruises came from. My cubicle neighbor is also notorious for injuring herself on desk attachments, like the pullout keyboard thing-a-ma-bob. That piece of useless equipment is almost always responsible for the muffled grunt of pain coming from that direction once a day.

For those lucky individuals who are granted an office, I hear it comes with a price. One of my editors grew increasingly frustrated with the male cardinals ramming into his window, apparently thinking their reflections were competing males. So he devised a plan. He cut out two construction paper owls and taped them to the window, thinking they would scare the birds away. He claims these shapes are “owls,” but he admits they have failed. They remain taped to the window, but sometimes the cardinals still hurl themselves exactly where the shapes are taped. Next, he asked the maintenance department to help. So they strapped a plastic decoy owl to the tree trunk in an attempt to deter the suicidal birds. My editor claims he can hear the faint sound of cardinals laughing as they perch next to the fake owl. Unlike The Office episode a couple weeks ago, we have yet to put the birds to rest on a funeral pyre. I suspect it may happen eventually.

My balance has never been great, and it’s worse during cold season. One day I remember rolling my chair out of my cubicle a little to see if someone was still here (Yes, it’s lazy, but efficient.) I knew if their office light was off it meant they were gone. So I leaned over the chair arm a little to look down the aisle, thus tipping the chair and toppling onto the floor with the chair on top of me. This would have been embarrassing enough, but of course my co-workers stood up and came out of offices to see what the crash was. I claimed I was fine as I put the chair back in place and climbed back into it with my head hung low. But I think I’ve fully recovered now.

Think you can top my corporate experiences? I’d love to hear about it. And I promise not to submit your comments to the writers of The Office, making a fortune from your misfortune. I’ll only do that if they reject my blunders.