Crazy Antics of the Week

This has been a truly zany week. Case in point:

1) On Wednesday I finally ventured to Shad (the gym) for a Personal Fitness Assessment. I walk into the weight room, go up to the desk and ask for Darlene (my trainer) and the guy responds, "Sorry ma'am but emergencies come first." Puzzled, I look to my right and see a young man keeled over with a blood-soaked towel pressed against his head -- whoa! Turns out this guy was doing a reverse crunch exercise on a reclining chair with a 25 pound dumbbell balancing between his feet. The story continues as the dumbbell slips from his feet and falls on his head caushing two huge gashes (and can you imagine how much that must have hurt? A 25 pound weight is damn heavy)! At first I'm like, okay this is just like real life Grey's Anatomy -- lots of blood and an outrageously unbelievable emergency. But then I start to feel faint. Faint as in the room is blacking out, my hearing is going fuzzy and I feel like I may pass out. I sit down on the floor and the woman behind the desk says to tell her if I start to feel the cold sweats. Lo and behold, I'm sweaty and cold so she runs to get a cold compress for my head so I don't faint. So here's this guy bleeding waiting for the EMTs and here I am sitting on the floor 3 feet from him almost passing out. I guess it's a good thing I didn't go into medicine! (Postscript: Luckily, I did not pass out and the gentleman was taken to the hospital under non-life threatening conditions).

2) Also on Wednesday night, I joined my sectionmates for a night of karaoke at a local Irish Pub called Tommy Doyle's. The night was a ton of fun and I decided to open a bar tab around 11, so I handed the bartender my debit card and went along my merry way. About an hour later, I left with a bunch of friends to walk home and forgot to close out my tab and get my credit card. By the time I realized I had forgotten it, I was in bed, it was 1 a.m. and there was no way I was heading back for it alone that evening. I didn't think twice about it when I went to the bar the next afternoon to pick up my card, but my heart started to pound a little when the card could not be found. According to the bartender, when he realized I had forgotten my card, he closed out my tab, wrapped the receipt around it and left it in a plastic cup behind the bar. Now the cup was gone and the card was nowhere to be found. The manager assured me that they would continue looking, that perhaps it had fallen somewhere and he would get back to me later that afternoon. About an hour later I get an e-mail from Bank of America alerting me to the irregular credit card activity on my debit card and asking me to verify the charges or call the bank immediately. Now I got freaking scared. I checked my account and someone had fraudulently charged $600 on my card that day. To make a long story short, that evening was ruined as I now had to file a fraud report with the bank, file a police report with the Cambridge police, have my account closed down and re-opened and contact the owner of the bar to alert him to the situation. What makes things worse is the fact that the card was likely stolen by an employee of the bar since it was in an area that customers don't have access to. The case is not yet closed -- both the police and the owner of the bar are conducting investigations to find out who made these charges -- and because they charged more than $500 on my card, it's considered a felony and the person will be arrested when they're caught!

Crazy, just plain crazy.

On a positive note, the first signs of fall are starting to appear around Boston. Check out the first red tree of the season on the HBS campus:

Also stay tuned for several blog posts over the next few days. I plan to do a summary and review of my classes so far, an introduction to the clubs I've joined and a summary of some of the awesome events I've participated in during the last two weeks. For now I'm off to a local dive to celebrate a friend's birthday! Gnite!