dlowan wrote:Nonsense.
That was always nonsense and still is.
You can get out from under the desk, Boida.
You look...well....a litte odd all alone under there.
You ok?
If I might be allowed a minor digression in this thread....
While I was living in Seattle there was an earthquake. Not a really huge earthquake -- a 6.1, I think it was, and centered an hour or two south of the city -- but folks up there aren't used to temblors, and the landfill that some of the newer bits of the city are built on quivers like Jello.
Anyhoo, I was at work in a large office at the University of Washington when the shaking started. Having grown up in California, I'd been through a few little shakes, and they don't much faze me. I looked around, checked my options, made sure there was nothing likely to fall on me, and sat back to wait it out.
The department chair came running out of his office, screamed "EVERYONE OUT OF THE BUILDING!" and went dashing out the back door (which has, I might add, several 70+ year old bits of statuary protruding from the the four stories of brick walls above it). A number of folks looked a little white and jammed themselves into doorways. The walls that housed the doorways were flimsy 1960s-era partitions, and the door frames probably as likely to collapse on you as to protect you from the building above, but at least they weren't following the fearful leader outside to ride it out under the brick buildings and power lines and old, dying oak trees.
In any event, the shaking lasted 20 or 30 seconds, then subsided. As the tumult died down over a few minutes, I became aware of a muted quivering voice from the area of the cubicles behind me. Some searching revealed the puncta maximum to be the desk of a secretary of the age when she would have had to shelter under a school desk in the event of nuclear armageddon. Her phone cord trailed off the edge of her desk and looped under it. Her chair had been knocked over. When I went around to see if she was all right, I found her in a fetal position under the desk, clutching a telephone handset, and muttering softly to herself. I told her that everything was okay and she could come out from under the desk. I've never seen anyone look so terrified in my life.
Later that night, watching the news, I saw pictures of people who had crowded onto firescraper fire escapes, who'd huddled together inexplicably on a bridge over a busy street and a mess of high-voltage cables that power the city's electrical bus system. And I figured, at least J had done something sensible. As out-of-proportion as her response to the threat was, she drew on some old training she'd had and dove under that desk. It wouldn't have kept her from getting vaporized by a nuclear blast, but it might have protected her from being brained by one of the number of large, gaudily framed family photos she displayed at the edge of her filing cabinet.
God bless the Cold War.
