First Aid Class

As an officer of the Rutgers University Cycling Team, I was required to attend a First Aid course. I was pretty pissed about it, and there was even a blog post brewing in my mind all day. This course would be a waste of my time, there are EMTs and ambulances at every race, every guideline was completely intuitive, and goddamnit there are better things I could be doing.

FarmerAndy and I showed up and proceeded to zone out. The instructors gave us gauze to practice dressing wounds; we separated the gauze into individual strands to kill time. The instructors showed us Red Cross videos; we made sarcastic comments about them, mostly whispered.

It was just as boring as we expected. Until some kid walked into a wall.

That's right, some poor bastard excused himself to go to the bathroom, walked towards to the door, lost consciousness, and slammed face-first into a wall.

It was awesome.

It probably doesn't speak well of the rest of the class, semi-trained first aid people that we were, how we just stared at him like he'd just given birth. We wondered if it was a stunt, trying to get our attention by reproducing the "medical emergency" we'd just been talking about... we stopped wondering when the paramedics came.

I'm pretty sure this isn't irony, 'cause English majors are always talking about how the term irony is so often misused (cue the comment from NTW). There's probably some more appropriate term in a liberal artist's lexicon. Perhaps someone can enlighten me?

There is one term that clearly fits this situation. Schadenfreude. I was amused by what happened, and I'm not ashamed!