to feel like a pinball
- idiom
- Informal
:
sentirse como una pelota de pinball
- He was so overwhelmed by unexpected events that he felt like a pinball bouncing around all day.
Examples
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With constant interruptions and shifting priorities, the manager often feels like a pinball in the office.
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After changing jobs three times in one year, she felt like a pinball moving through her career.
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After the meeting, I felt like a pinball in the office.
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She feels like a pinball when she has too many tasks.
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After changing jobs three times in one year, she felt like a pinball moving through her career.
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He was so overwhelmed by unexpected events that he felt like a pinball bouncing around all day.
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With constant interruptions and shifting priorities, the manager often feels like a pinball in the office.
Antonyms
How Controlled
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is a simile that maps the literal behavior of a pinball (bouncing unpredictably from bumper to bumper) onto an internal state, so a learner who knows 'feel', 'like' and 'pinball' can plausibly infer the sense of being pushed around and disoriented. However, the meaning depends on cultural/lexical knowledge of how pinball behaves and is a metaphorical extension rather than a strictly compositional combination, so it is not fully predictable for all learners.
Etymology
The phrase feel like a pinball comes from the old pinball machine, where a metal pinball is hit by flippers and bumpers and bounces around. One popular image is of that ball being pushed from side to side without control, so it now means 'to feel confused and without a clear direction'.