The priorities of the species. · 1:46pm Aug 13th, 2014
I just saw a commercial for a new series coming to the Weather Channel. As with so many WC original offerings, it's all about the myriad ways in which the world can kill you, with this particular edition focusing on death-or-nearly-so via hurricane. The preview spot featured a young adult male who had made the mistake of opening his front door during Hurricane Sandy, only to be sucked out onto the porch, where he apparently flipped over the railing before grabbing onto it with both hands, clinging to the only thing keeping him from being fully taken into the storm.
So here he is, hanging onto that railing. The measure of his lifespan is the duration of his grip. The odds of his outlasting the storm are -- low, and that word may be a little too charitable. He's probably not going to make it.
So he calls his father.
Let's think about that for a second.
There are numerous debates to be made about the merits of such a final call in and of itself. On the one hand, you say goodbye. It's a chance to right final wrongs. The person spoken to will never have to live with the mystery of what happened to you.
Speaking against, you are potentially putting your parent through the trauma of hearing you die, and those words will echo in their soul forever. You're also giving them the non-gift of helplessness, knowing there is nothing they can do to save you. Not a kind thing to do with anyone.
Really, you could go both ways on whether to make that final call.
Now: the commercial was a recreation of events -- one which was being narrated by the young adult male in question. He lived through this. So to that degree, all turned out well.
But to me, this aspect of his situation also stood out.
The phone is in his pocket.
He's not telekinetic. The unit is not being removed from local storage, held against his face, and dialed by sheer force of will.
He has to take a hand off the railing.
An act which puts his chances a thin shade over zero. It's basically giving the murderous storm a diminished count of assisted suicide. He may not be able to hang on with a diminished grip long enough to make the call at all. One good gust and that now-free hand might never receive the nerve signal to clear the pocket.
A final act of love and sacrifice in the face of death? Sheer brute-force social media generation record-everything stupidity? A mix?
Perhaps the Weather Channel modeled some of the recreation shots after any handy Hurricane Selfies.
Wow. His heart was debatably in the right place, but that's grounds for an honorary Darwin Award right there.
He gets points for thinking of family and loses a lot more points for making such a counterproductive decision. Hell of a story to tell his kids, though.
I hate mobile phones.
I was an early adopter back in the '90s. When the only thing a mobile could do was voice call, SMS text message, and the really high-end ones played "Snake." Standby time was measured in hours, and talk time in minutes. Call charges were beyond ridiculous. The damn thing was a useless brick clipped to my belt. I hated the bloody thing.
I upgraded three times before I came to my senses. I then spent 10 years without one. Bliss!
I now have a smartphone. Call charges are still ridiculous, and now are combined with the poverty inducing "mobile data" charges. One of the only things that stop me from pitching the stupid thing is the GPS function. (I have been known to get lost at the end of my own driveway, and I live on a cul-de-sac.) I just don't get how the modern generation can (seemingly) live their whole lives on the blasted things.
To add insult to injury, I can't use the thing at work for (quite valid) safety concerns.
Kids, no call is that important. Concentrate on surviving first. Make the call after you live through it.
As a bonus, you won't have to shout over the maelstrom of destruction...
I'd think that all the father could have heard was the GIANT ROARING WHOOSH of the hurricane's winds ... another reason it was a stupid decision.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that the young man in question was making shit up to make his experience seem more interesting
2366980
Are you suggesting that Stateside reality television would go so far as to air a falsehood and claim a lie was the true unedited story of events? Is that what you're suggesting?
Because, y'know, most of us just treat it as a fact,.
2366990
I shall boldly stand up for truth in the face of ironic detachment and modern-day jadedness. The earnest revolution will not be stopped! I will live my radical beliefs of a life dedicated to quietly getting by with my neighbors, nurturing my hobbies in private, being annoyed with politicians, and wishing things were generally better in various ways!
Hey, when you think you're gonna die, does rationale thinking really make sense? If he was trying to make what he believed to be his last call, it sounds like he pretty much gave up hope of surviving. So would it matter, dying with two hands on the railing or just one?
Actually, a hurricane doesn't have the kind of wind speeds needed to pick up a human being: that's more like tornado speeds. Still, it wouldn't be any pleasant, as a Class 3 or greater can make it very hard to just stay rooted in place and you always risk being hit by flying junk, and greater classes can start to play with parked cars.
Incidentally, if a hurricane Class 3 or greater comes knocking, you need to choose between huddling down in a concrete building, or evacuating. Additionally, you need to make sure that the building is well away from the water, not low ground, and way above sea level.
2367045
It doesn't sound like you have ever hung; not even from playground equipment as a kid.
In such a situation, a normal person would have just clung to his lifeline, having trouble to even release an arm to grab a rope. Now, to release the lifeline to make a call… that's complete bullshit.
2367486
A normal person would have clung to a lifeline, yes, but this is not a normal situation. The fact that he tried making what he believed to be the last call of his life demonstrates that he probably given up hope of surviving. In his mind, that lifeline may not have been anything more than a delay in the inevitable.
Normal people make dumb decisions when forced into desperate situations. They become desperate.
2367521
Actually, it is a normal survival situation, and while deeply trained people will react according to their training, normal people rely exclusively on instinct. You are being pulled into a current: your instinct is to cling to whatever.
Do you know what's one of the most typical ways in which people drown when trying to swim across rivers? They fixate themselves on swimming in a straight line and then panic when the current drags them away. What they should do is to let themselves be dragged and just concentrate on getting across!
So, unless the kid had been clinging there for a several minutes (so he could get back his whits and stop relying on pure instinct) that sounds totally scripted to me.
This reminds me - slightly - of this guy, who called his wife from the summit of Mt Everest in 1996 to effectively say goodbye to her. The difference being that he had zero chance of survival, as opposed to a small chance made smaller by letting one hand go to make a phone call. In his place, I would have made that call from the top of Everest.
For the young guy hanging by one hand in a hurricane, was it social media generation record-everything stupidity? I would bet that probably fed into it. But people who panic in dangerous situations are not well known for rational thought.
I think it's more probable that it was a lack of self-awareness and a lack of a sense of self-preservation, the knowledge that in a life/death situation, you are alive until you're literally dead, and you have a much better chance of staying alive if you don't just give up trying think more clearly, and make decisions that count toward your survival.
2367446
Depends on the hurricane. While most hurricanes are not truly capable of picking up a human being, they are, in fact, capable of sending one tumbling end over end - and a strong enough hurricane is actually capable of picking up a car. Andrew did it; there are pictures of a UHaul TRUCK that Andrew managed to lift on top of a building.
2366990
Reality TV. If I may be so bold, I suggest that these two words be listed in the dictionary as the prime example following the definition of the word "oxymoron".
2368199
I would know about hurricanes: I have lived in Cancun since 2001, so I experienced Wilma and I know what it is to have to stock an emergency pantry (and have to rotate the stock), armour doors and windows, tuck tail for 72 hours, then go out there and help my neighbours to dig their cars from underneath fallen brick walls, have to organize ourselves into a round-the-clock anti-looting squad (looting got very serious after the storm), then go to my university and lose about a month of classes between the cleaning effort, then while teachers had to fight for the few classrooms becoming available, or us students knowing that the class is on, but not knowing where.
Here are some of my favourite photos relating to Wilma at Universidad del Caribe:
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Sand blast!
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Freshly opened classroom(s). We Mexicans build in concrete, but the inner walls were still American-styled chalk-board.
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Natural ventilation got a lot more serious. And once again, the building itself was thankfully untouched.
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After a week of shovelling out glass and chalk-walls and washing the furniture, the damage looked a lot more manageable. Too bad that things then got pretty weird between teachers not having even whiteboards (all got soaked), us not knowing where the next class was (classrooms got changed daily and they weren't being posted anywhere) and the reconstruction crews every now and then roping off entire wings of buildings so they could
rip off the budgetwork in peace.Besides, I said cars because cars are a lot harder to move than trucks. Simply put, cars might be much lighter than trucks, but trucks aren't only a lot less dense, but also possess lateral aerodynamic profiles that have a lot more to do with barns than with cars. Busses can be flipped with as little as Class-1 winds!
And well, if I remember correctly, that thing about the U-Haul truck was that it got sucked into a dead-end ally, which amplified the wind until it could pick it up. Of course, the truck remained on the building rather than fall behind it because, once on the roof, it wasn't subject to amplified winds.
It's similar to the roadkill I ate the first day after Wilma: the next door neighbour passed us a big chuck of this huge fish that had appeared on his roof. And we live like eight kilometres from the coast, for crying out loud!