Ina Fried for AllThingsD:
At one point, Ballmer and Smith were walking back to their conference room together. But, in just a moment, he was gone and there was a loud scream, the kind of yell that only comes from the uncommonly strong lungs of the voluble Microsoft leader.
The roar startled the Nokia team, who figured that Ballmer had reacted particularly negatively to one of their proposals, while those in Microsoft’s conference room had no idea what was going on. Then, they heard the sound of people running, which seemed even more unsettling.
What happened, it had turned out, was that Ballmer had not seen a clear glass coffee table and had tripped, hitting his head and leaving a gash on his forehead, just above the eyebrow.
Firstly, this whole story sounds to me like a rejected script for The Office.
Secondly, think about this for a second: an innocuous coffee table placement could have derailed a deal worth 7.2 billion dollars and tens of thousands of jobs.
Man, this planet is weird.