An antidote to another day of watching Internet Butthurt ("Those people over there disagree with me and put me down, so I get to say mean things about them right back!!!"), a real-life idiot who might even have died, base-jumping from a tall tower and finding a guy wire in the dark...with his parachute.
At least he had some skin in the game -- and he's now been arrested by the real-life po-leece and will face criminal charges, after hanging a hundred-fifty feet up in the air for a couple of hours wondering when he was going to die. (Oh, and if there're high-power VHF/UHF antennas on the tower, he might've cooked his eyeballs.) Tell me again about how tererrrrrrrible-awful those not-like-you Internet baddies are?
Aside from all of the other ways to seriously injure yourself via base-jumping, going blind from radio-frequency exposure because you were base-jumping off a radio tower just seems to cry out for an version of the Darwin Awards.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention putting the first responders into similar danger - or are the procedures for shutting down the towers under those circumstances?
I wonder if he would have sued the company that owned/operated the tower if he had been injured.
It's been 30+ years since I worked a board shift, but we had multiple means of shutting off the transmitter, beginning with the control console at the studio in town and ending with driving out to the shack and pulling the circuit breaker. Sort of an FCC thingy before they license you to operate one of those things.
ReplyDeleteIn my case it was more of a matter of driving out to the shack and cycling the circuit breakers whenever they arced off. Which being a transmitter custom built for Las Vegas, and sold to a station that placed it in a cornfield in Iowa, happened quite regularly during the summer. Bit of a humidity difference don't ya know.
...of course, you have to know the base jumper is up there in order to shut things off....
ReplyDeleteAnd decide that the idiot is worth the down time.....
ReplyDelete;) I kid...sort of.
BGM
Roberta, I was thinking more of protecting the EMS responders, not Interfering with Natural Selection.
ReplyDelete