The Safest Man's Final Ticking

Reginald Pinter, 67, had elevated risk aversion to an art form. His apartment was a hermetically sealed, padded fortress against the vagaries of existence. No stairs (too precipitous), no sharp objects (his nutrient paste was served with a silicone spoon), no outdoors (the air was triple-filtered and vigorously interrogated for errant pathogens). Reginald was the Fort Knox of human safety, a walking, talking, immaculately bubble-wrapped testament to the power of paranoia. He’d even insulated his living space against rogue Wi-Fi signals, just in case a stray byte decided to go postal.

One Tuesday, while meticulously inspecting the highly polished chrome of his airlock's pressure gauge for theoretical micro-fractures, fate, ever the impish playwright, decided to pull the rug out from under him. Or rather, to trip him over his own distorted reflection. Startled by the sudden glint of his own terrified visage, Reginald lost his footing on the very *anti-slip* matting designed to prevent such calamities.

He fell, not onto the forgiving padded floor, but directly onto his chest. Specifically, onto his antique, heirloom pocket watch – the one object his late grandmother had insisted he carry, nestled in his otherwise unburdened shirt pocket, as a "comforting link to the past." The watch, a relic from an era delightfully oblivious to safety regulations, possessed a surprisingly sharp winding stem.

Reginald Pinter, the man who had outsmarted every imaginable danger, succumbed not to a fall, nor a pathogen, nor a rogue Wi-Fi signal, but to a sentimental trinket. The irony, dark and delicious, was lost on no one but Reginald himself. The coroner’s report, after much head-scratching, vaguely attributed his demise to "blunt force trauma from a non-specified antique horological device." His long-suffering nephew, upon inheriting Reginald’s meticulously safe but utterly stifling fortune, penned his epitaph: "Reginald Pinter: Finally on time."