A woman had to be rescued by fire brigade when a sofa got stuck in the stairwell leaving her trapped in the basement for three hours. Melissa, 53, who does not want her surname to be published, was moving the sofa into the basement with the help of her partner, Todd, 55, when it became stuck.
Daughter Claire, 23, found her mum trapped on the wrong side of the sofa and tried to help - before giving up. Melissa, a preschool teacher, was stuck in the basement for almost three hours while Claire and Todd tried to dislodge a handrail from the wall in hopes of freeing her.
Todd, an energy company manager, even made a hole in the wall trying to get the sofa into the basement, but to no avail. Eventually, the family had to call firefighters. The fire brigade successfully got the handrail off the wall by wriggling through the hole.
Claire, a law student, said: "I thought it was hilarious. My parents did not think it was funny. My dad was mad because of the damage and my mom thought she was never getting out.
"When the fire brigade got there I was really trying to insert myself into the situation, because I have a twin sister and I wanted to film it for her."
Speaking about the minor damage, she said: "I don't think it should be expensive to fix. After the fact, my mom thought it was really funny. We laughed about it afterwards.
"This was definitely not the typical evening in my house. But there's definitely a lot of chaos and craziness around."
Claire posted the video to TikTok and it quickly went incredibly viral, accumulating 13 million views since it was posted. Her newfound viewers flooded the comments sections with references to the famous episode of the sitcom 'Friends', in which the characters fail to move a sofa.
Comments on TikTok read: “911, we didn’t pivot," and "Pivot! pivot! pivot!, she did in fact, not pivot" - a reference to an iconic scene in sitcom Friends.
