Box of Hats and Wigs

Quite possibly one of the best ideas I’ve ever come up with is one called the ‘Great Stair Theory’. Well, I say it’s one of the best – as other people and I seem to have remembered it at least 4 years on, it must be slightly good. …or maybe it’s memorable for the wrong reasons.

The idea originated on a message board called Pixeltendo. One member, probably aged around 11 at the time, posted a thread about his love life woes. He was rambling on in depth about several girls… telling us a bit about them, what he thought of them and what he thought they thought of him.

His big problem: oh, by heavens, what should he do?! Which girls like him? Which should he go for? Oh, surely by asking the great collective fountain of knowledge that is an Internet forum, he shall find guidance!

What a bloody stupid idea that was.

For starters, there wasn’t much point in asking Pixeltendo. At the time the member base was generally around the same age (give or take a few years, or in one case around 9 years, but he still denies being a paedophile), consisting of people who had little or no experience in the field of “relationships” and were spending considerable amounts of their times on video games, or discussing them on the internet. I should note that a few years on, not much changed, except more of them turned in to perverts.

Another slight issue is the pointlessness of relationships at that age. I guess it’s good to ‘get the foot in the door’, so to speak. Though, the major mistake with this poster’s idea to ask us to help him was that the collective ‘us’ involves me. I can’t remember the advice that everyone else gave, but for some strange reason, everyone else remembers the advice I gave.

Alright, what you have to do, is get the three of them, and get them to the top of a stair case. OK, what you do then, is shove all of them down the stairs, rather hard. The one that bleeds the least will hate you the least, and you should go out with her.

I don’t know why I came up with that either and I should be more worried for my own mental state. However, on the face of it, it seems like a pretty good idea. The problem of picking one is solved, and also the problem of the other two pining over him whilst he is with the “lucky” one. It’s a win-win situation. Except the blood, but that’s a minor technicality.

This advice was first given around four years ago, but I’m not sure it’s ever been put to the test. In that time, I realised something. Not that it is a brilliant way of solving the problem, I knew that already. No - it’s that it can be applied to almost every relationship problem.

Someone’s cheating on you? Why, push them down the stairs! Someone’s flirting with you and you really don’t want to go out with him or her? Stairs! Not sure if someone likes you? Stairs! Someone really likes someone, but that person’s really horrible to them, so they can’t really tell…?

Bugger me, I have no idea. I didn’t think about it in THAT much detail.

That was a scenario posed in a chat with a friend from Sixth Form, Becky, at 1am over MSN. We were talking about how ‘lol’ should never actually be said in real conversation, and without intention, I mentioned stairs.

“Stairs,” I said. “Very useful things.”
“Yes. Especially if you want to go… up? Or down for that matter.”

With the topic of stairs brought up (or down, if you’ll excuse the pun), I saw fit to explain my great theory about how stairs “are the solution to every relationship problem ever”. And I did.

“I don’t think that solves an awful lot,” she responded.

Becky seemed to be skeptical about the idea. Well, there’s only one way to deal with sceptics, evidence! Sadly, I don’t have any, and thus had to resort to hypothetical situations. I set a small challenge: she would state a relationship problem scenario, and I would expertly solve it through the use of The Great Stair Theory.

“Ummm… someone really likes someone, but that person’s really horrible to them, so they can’t really tell them…”

Ugh, that’s a hard one. I sat there for a good minute and a half to come up with some way of using my untried and untested solution for this situation. Maybe… the one who the other is being mean to pushes the horrible one down the stairs, and sees the reaction? No, that might not work too well. Do it as a test? See how hard they push you down the stairs? Ugh, it’s not a watertight solution.

In a situation like this, there are two options. The first one is to bluff – come up with something so overly long and contrived that she’ll be too confused to poke holes in the specifics. I’m generally good at that sort of thing, but there was a problem. In doing so, she wouldn’t have been made aware of the true brilliance of the theory: the idea of this challenge is so that I prove it.

I had to go for the second route: get around it. I noticed a similarity between what she described and the situation between her and somebody else at Sixth Form. With a healthy dose of sarcasm (you have to have your five-a-day) I say it “sounds familiar anyway” and questioned her on the identity of said person.

So, with that tangent, she was distracted from the fact I never justified the stairs – it worked, and a line is drawn under that scenario.

“I’ll test it someday,” she said.
“I guarantee it will work”, I said, but for legal reasons, added the disclaimer “(to some degree)”. I have not yet stated what that degree is, and I have no desire to.

On an unrelated note, I think she became paranoid of when me I stood with her near stairs.

To this day, the Stair Theory remains untested. In retrospect, that’s probably for the best.