People think that they are small and that the world is big, but sometimes the world shrinks unexpectedly and you find yourself to be a lot bigger than you had thought, and maybe you get stuck in a chimney or a revolving door or a relationship.

A British man, Leo Wan, told The Guardian, a serious newspaper, about the time that he got stuck in a chimney at a party. Wan and his friends were on someone's roof in east London, watching the sunset, when Wan decided to sit on the chimney, because there wasn't much room anywhere else. "I thought it would be dangerous to have my back to the chimney, so I sat on the rim with my legs dangling inside," he says. "In hindsight, that was my first mistake."

Wan made it out alive. And thank goodness! What a way to go that would have been. Meanwhile, for The Awl, a serious website, Jess Lowry recounts the 51 minutes she spent in a revolving door. It gets bleak at 45 minutes:

At this point, I start to lose it. Stuck in the revolving door, this is where I'm going to die. Of course it is, though. Fueled by indecisiveness. Wholly transparent. Locked in frustrated, circular motion. Tights-that-I-thought-were-black-but-that-are-navy. Everything within reach. But nothing attainable. Thin air (?). On my knees. With my laptop. And lots of chewing gum. Goodbye world. I call my father again. "Now honey, are you sure you've pushed the door?"

I have had two experiences getting stuck in things. When I was in the third grade, I think, I was driving to soccer practice with my dad. He was the coach, and we were late, so he was anxious and hurrying. We pulled into the parking lot, I got out of the car, he popped the trunk and I grabbed the bag of balls and orange cones we would use to set up a field. He shut the trunk and walked away. I didn't move, because my hand was caught in the trunk. "Brendan, come on," he said. "Brendan. Come on. We're late." I couldn't. I was stuck. Help.

Eventually he stopped being mad, because he realized it was all his fault and I couldn't talk because my hand was stuck in the trunk of the car and it hurt, excuse me, hello, ow. In any event, it was fine: one of my fingers was fractured or something, but it wasn't a big deal.

A year later I was on a class trip to the Liberty Science Center, a very cool science museum-place that kids in New Jersey get to go to, I guess, to do science stuff? Right, so, everyone was very excited, because you could pick up cockroaches and play with robots and things, so we were all rushing to get inside, and there was a revolving door, and my two classmates ahead of me jumped into the vestibule in front of me and somehow—really, this is a true story, somehow, don't ask me how, but it happened, I promise—my head got stuck in the door, and the kids in front of me were pushing harder and harder because what the heck, why is the door stuck. They were panicking, and understandably so! Because as Jess Lowry so artfully recounted, what could be worse than getting stuck in a revolving door? (Answer: getting just your head stuck in a revolving door.)

So. They kept pushing, and my head kept being stuck. Eventually someone alerted them that the blockage was my big stupid head, and they stopped pushing, and the revolving door swung backwards, and I pulled my head out, a little dizzy, but none worse for the wear, really.

Anyway, we made our way into the Liberty Science Center, the main attraction of which was, at the time, a pitch-black touch-tunnel, into which some 50-something fourth-graders poured, and immediately started screaming, because some idiot at the front led us down a dead-end and we were all going to die.

And that's why people need whiskers, because whiskers are how cats avoid getting stuck in things, and that seems like a useful trait to have.

[Image via Shutterstock]