I have a feeling, if you set Bear and I in the same room and just listened to us talk, you would have a novel the size of Oregon..
I don't actually remember the two scariest moments in my life.
The first, I was eight. My brother and I are spending the weekend with my grandparents' farm.
I'm riding an ATC and trying to duplicate the jump my brother had just performed. I turned at the gate, down into the ditch, up out of the ditch... and the front wheel kept going up. This part is reconstructed: The wheel goes straight up the mailbox. The rollbar at the back doesn't work on frikking hills. The ATC flips over on top of me, my too-big helmet flops back, and the handlebar nails me in the forehead. I push the bike off of me and stagger out of the ditch.
I get on behind my brother on his cycle. He says, "don't drip on me." Er... what? Then something drips in front of my face. Now, I'm eight years old with these really neat white cotton "riding gloves" on. I reach up to my forehead, and the gloves come back bright red.
We drive up to the farmhouse and I run in screaming, "Grandma, are my brains running out?!?!?!?"
All's well that ends well, though. She's a farmwife who's seen her share of emergencies. She puts a compress on the gash on my head, and I sit waiting while everyone packs up. We then drive into town, where the ER doc stitches up the two-inch gash in my head.
The second time is the next summer, and we're visiting Grandma and Grandpa again. Riding the same frikkin ATC, but as a passenger behind an inexperienced driver.
Approaching a bridge over a creek, with not enough weight on the front wheel, the bike loses traction and we slowly drift off the crown of the gravel road.
I yell, "turn the wheel."
"I am!" comes his reply.
I didn't have time to tell him to let off the gas.
We then fly off of a 15-foot retaining wall at about 25 mph. We land upside-down in the creek. I look up to see murky light above me, but I can't reach it. I'm trapped under the bike. After an eternity (or, 15 seconds or so) I manage to get loose and stand up. My friend and I manage to pull ourselves up the creek bank. He has a big gash in his calf where he caught the guard rail. My cheeks are packed with mud, which I scoop out with my fingers. (I imagine myself screaming and then face-planting in the bottom of the creek....)
Wet and scared, I hike back to the house to get help. No stitches for me this time, but my friend got some in his leg.
We were lucky, though. That creek normally had about six inches of water in it. It had rained two days before, and the creek was running about 2 1/2 feet higher than normal. The day before, it had been running fast and about 9 feet deep.....
I didn't ride ATCs anymore after that.
This only scares me in retrospect: My (older) brother and I climbed into the hayloft to throw firecrackers at the pigs below. When we ran out of fireworks, we started throwing matches.
My grandfather was white as a sheet and shaking with rage when he found us.
i would never ride an atv after that either
holy..... crap..
My civilian scariest moment involved me piloting a boat through a severe squall line with very high winds and high seas.
Its a reletively small boat. All I could think of was "by the numbers, dont do anything out of panic."
LEt out the anchor to act as a sea anchor and a ground line.
Keep everyone else below.
Hand out life jackets and blow up the tender (zodiac)
It was about a 60 min experience and lots of close calls, lightning struck a bell bouyoff in the bay and the wind and whitecaps kept the boat almost standing still. I had the engine wide open past cruise speed and we probably only made 1 to 2 knots.
The stitches in my head were really cool for show-and-tell.
Thirteen, right in the middle of my forehead. Think "Harry Potter" but more gorey. I looked like Frankenstein's monster.
BBB risked her life to do the right thing
Unions are as vulnerable to corruption as any other corporation and government. I risked my life twice to do the right thing. In both cases, I gave my attorney a witnessed statement of the threat against my life to be held in his office safe if anything happened to me.
My first union job in the 1960s was for a large Teamster local union in northern California. I was hired as the bookkeeper. It was difficult to work in this office because the office manager went into the union president's office next to my office each noontime to have sex with him. They were both married to other people.
After about a year of bookkeeping, I discovered that the union president was stealing the union member's dues money. He was a powerful man in the city and a member of the grand jury. So I quietly documented his thefts until I had enough evidence to prove his corruption. I privately showed my evidence to the leader of a group of members who wanted to reform the local union. They cautioned me that my life would be in danger if I exposed the crook. So I quit my high-paying job. Instead of giving the reformers the paper trail evidence, I showed them where to find the evidence and what it meant, and who all was involved in the corruption, including some trustees. The reformers waited for about three months after I left the job during an election campaign to bring charges against the union president. He was voted out of office, but was never indicted for his crimes. The office manager departed with him. So did several union trustees.
Several years later, I was the bookkeeper for a large local Retail Clerks union in California, which also had a large credit union in it's office. After working there for two years, the Credit Union woman manager and I discovered that the newly elected union president was trying to corrupt the credit union. She collected the evidence and several women members planned to confront the union president with his corruption in a public meeting. He walked into the trap and was removed as a credit union officer. The president fired me from my job for my part in taking the him down, but I won the grievance filed against him and was restored to my job. Then I quit!
There are many ethical union members who take on their corrupt officials, sometimes at great risk, and restore their unions to their responsibilities of servicing their members. Some are men but many are women. I was only one of them.
BBB
My father was an employer. The union members would come and do donuts in the front yard when contract negotiations were in progress. My Dad bent over backwards trying to work with those people, but it was next to impossible. You can't deal with stupid.
Unions are corrupt by nature. I'm sorry you found that out the hard way. I'm surprised you are still such an idealist.
cjsha
cjhsa wrote:My father was an employer. The union members would come and do donuts in the front yard when contract negotiations were in progress. My Dad bent over backwards trying to work with those people, but it was next to impossible. You can't deal with stupid.
Unions are corrupt by nature. I'm sorry you found that out the hard way. I'm surprised you are still such an idealist.
Have you ever risked your job, much less your life, by exposing corruption in corporations?
BBB
I wasn't knocking you BBB.
