Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Crisis

The following anecdote is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

(Sound intro)

6:00 a.m. - A torrential rainstorm moves over the modest residential house of a respected middle-aged man.

6:45 a.m. - The rainstorm shows no signs of abating. The man starts to get nervous that his yard is flooding. This sets him into an irritable, edgy mood.

7:25 a.m. - The storm continues to dump water from the heavens at an ever-increasing rate. The man's yard is under 6 inches of water, a level that has never been seen before. A new concern is that the man's pool is getting dangerously close to the overflow stage.

8:30 a.m. - The pool is less than an inch from overflow. The man makes the decision that he must empty water out so that it does not get behind the pool liner, potentially causing thousands of dollars in damages.

8:45 a.m. - The man enters his cramped pool pump house and is instantly swarmed by blood-thirsty mosquitos. He is already soaked to the skin just from the short walk out there. After extending the drain hose into the back of his yard, he engages the pump to start draining water from the pool. Immediately the hose ruptures.

8:52 a.m. - After frantically re-attaching the hose to the outlet pipe, a task nearly impossible to pull off with wet hands, a second attempt is made to turn on the pump. The hose ruptures again.

8:53 a.m. - The man begins muttering words that would instantly turn a bottle of ultra-pure spring water jet black. In his rising anger he hits his head on the shelf in the pump house and badly skins two of his fingers trying to fend off the increasing mosquito swarm.

9:21 a.m. - A third attempt at attaching the drain hose leads to a third rupture. The pool is beginning to overflow. The man rips the hose stub off the outlet pipe and begins chewing on it and screaming at the top of his lungs.

9:47 a.m. - The man throws his hands up and heads back inside, throwing a hissy fit in his garage that would make a two-year old envious.

10:35 a.m. - The man heads back outside to try again and notices several holes in the remaining hose stub and no further attempts can be made. He begins screaming like a rabid idiot. The rain abruptly stops and the world did not, in fact, come to an end.



This man clearly showed how not to act in times of crisis. Can you spot where he went wrong?