For example, I once saw a man throw his hat down in anger. He didn’t stomp on it which was kind of a let down.
I went trough the old pictures of my granddad, turns out he was the head of a european accident commission.
i saw him standing in a cooling facility full of human body bags, two times. one was a flight accident, one was a whole camping site that burned down in spain or portugal.
was like in the eighties and seventies. he had also pictures of him standing next to military jets and foreign politicians and stuff.
I crashed in a car with my wheelloader because i was staring after an afftractive women that went by on a bike.
you know, like in a comedy movie. was not a hard crash though, luckily.
We were in slow traffic and a car is trying to leave a parking lot. We give the other car some space to merge in, and they take it, but for the opposite way (passed us and entered going the opposite way we were going). It was a big infraction of the road rules. Right behind the guy was a cop car, I still remember his face, like “did I really just see this right in front of me?”. The cop turned on the lights and followed the rule breaker, we were laughing our asses off inside the car. The whole thing felt scripted out of a comedy schetch of something.
A less fun one was during the first lockout of the pandemic, I was standing at the window seeing a cop car slowly going by outside with big loudspeakers: “Stay at home. If you show simptoms of cough of fever call XXX. Stay at home. Mask use in public spaces is mandatory” Felt like the start sequence of a post apocaliptic movie or something.
If The Thing happened to me I would be dead and a grotesque alien would be using my body parts
In college, rowing for state championship. Sitting in the bow position rowing against the best team in the state. You’re not supposed to look out of the boat because you need to keep your head inline so as not to upset the boat. But because I was at the front I could see the other boat peripherally. When the gun went off and we started rowing I expected to see the back of their boat disappear, but it didn’t. And after pulling for a couple hundred meters they were still there. We were IN this thing. We weren’t losing.
To explain a little about rowing. The coxswain basically communicates with the stroke, the person right in front of him, the strongest rower that the rest of us follow. But he has a bull horn, or at least back then that’s what we used. So he communicates with the whole boat. If he calls a “power 10,” that means we are supposed to take 10 harder strokes to pick up some speed. A good coxswain knows when to call these. Obviously you can’t pull harder 100% of the time or you’ll burn out. But this time he was calling them more often than usual sending a subtle message that we were in the race of our lives. You can also hear the other boat calling power 10’s and we were matching them. The boat started to have what we call “swing.” This is when the rowers are all in sync producing a sort of harmony. The boat feels like it’s going faster. Like it’s up on plane (not a real thing in an 8 man racing shell).
As the race proceeded, we were neck and neck. At one point the boats got close. Our oars, nearly made contact with their oars. But it wasn’t our boat that was off coarse. It was theirs. We held the line as they corrected. They were supposed to beat us, but we were right there. We could hear the excitement in the voice of our coxswain. The finish line was approaching. We were all fighting from hitting the wall. Pushing harder than we ever had, knowing we had a chance. We heard the call from the other boat for a power 10 but our coxswain did not call one. I could see the back of the other boat pull slightly ahead and I thought, this is where they play their trump card. Ten strokes passed by and still nothing from our coxswain, we knew the finish line was coming up but nothing. At this point there is nothing else going through you mind. It’s just raw focus. Like tunnel vision. Then it happened. Our coxswain called out, “Power to the finish!” And then something like, “Row like hell! We’ve got this!” In my peripheral vision that boat was still right there, just like we were still at the start line. They had one of those old timey metal flag things that would rotate 90 degrees making a ching sound, then again when the next boat passed. It had gone ching-ching rapidly almost like a cha-ching, because we had crossed the finish line so close to each other. Then the moment we had been waiting for. He called, “Let it run,” meaning we could stop rowing the race was over. He kept us going straight while we all collapsed, laying backward in the boat, oars spread on the water haphazard. I could hear a guy in the other boat dry heaving. After a moment, when it momentum was spent, we were all just sitting there looking at each other asking the rowers on the other team, who one. No one knew. It was a photo finish. We had to wait for the results. It felt like forever. Our teammates were on the shore yelling something to us. There was some chaos we didn’t understand and I realized then, this was just like being in the movies.
As a matter of fact we did! I’m a state champion from like 30+years ago. It was a shirt race, meaning the loser had to turn over his team t-shirt to the other team. I was the proudest owner of the t-shirt of our arch nemesis.
It’s was also a requirement to win at State, to earn my own team’s t-shirt. So I finally had my team t-shirt too!
For about 30 minutes, because then I stroked a four man boat to a 4th place finish where I lost it to another team. I thought I had earned the shirt and coach would replace it, but nope that’s not the way it works. I was pissed. I never would have run that second race if I had understood that.
But I just have to give credit to our coxswain. He called the race perfectly and in no small way contributed to our win.
Coxswains are often looked upon like a kicker in American football. It doesn’t matter how bad the team messed up for the last three hours, if the kicker misses that crucial last kick, the whole game was lost due to him. This is because coxswains are dead weight. Since they don’t row, all they do is slow us down. This is why they are usually women, because woman are generally smaller and lighter. Ours just happened to be a small dude that earned his ride that day.
You know when a scientist/expert warns people about a disaster and they don’t believe him and a short time later they actually suffer from that disaster?
Well. I was that expert. I do disaster response planning for a living.Told a large public company that they are at risk of a certain scenario. They told me that they don’t believe it would apply to them and basically kicked me out.
Two weeks later they were on national news for it.
Not that it would have changed a thing - projects we do take months and do not prevent a disaster, just deal with the risk much better.
But still. Felt surreal.
