Don't Let This Happen to You!

When driving to the beach this summer, don't let this happen to you!

~Butrflynet




[email protected] swears this really happened to him...

OK. Here goes. I was 17, and had mentioned to my father that I was thinking of buying a rubber boat for use as a scuba platform. My father managed to get me one from the F.A.A. where he worked. (Don't ask, I never did).

What he brought me was one of those Air Force survival rafts that they
issue to bomber crews with up to 10 men. I couldn't wait to test it,
so I called Jason, and told him to come on over. I took the back seat
out of my VW bug, and laid the seat back down. This makes a VW bug
kind of like a hatch back without the hatch. Jason got over to my
place, just as our girlfriends showed up. They had come over to see if
we wanted to go swimming. I crammed the raft, and both girls in the
back of the VW (it was really tight), and Jason in the passenger seat
up front, and took off.

I got onto IH35 in Oklahoma City to head for one of the area lakes. The
windows were down and the hot August wind was roaring through the car
like a minor hurricane. My girlfriend started complaining about the
wind, and a little red tag that kept getting tangled in her hair. I
told her not to mess with the tag, but she got mad and gave it a good
hard yank, intending to throw it out the window.

Can you guess what that little red tag was for? Yep, that damned raft
started to inflate right there in the VW! It takes about 15 seconds
for one of those things to inflate, and for the first 5 seconds or so I
was frozen with something of a mixture fear, amazement, and a sense of
"this really can't be happening!" In the 6th second the raft started
pushing my head down against the steering wheel hard enough that I
couldn't really see where I was going, and started pushing the windows
that weren't down out of their frames, and onto the road. By the time
I got my wits back, the raft was fully inflated.

I managed to push my head up enough to see where I was going, and
hopefully avoid creaming anyone else on the road. By this time the
real chaos had started. The girls were screaming their fool heads off,
Jason was laughing like an idiot, and the Oklahoma Highway Patrolman
that had been following me when all this started had turned on his
siren.

I finally got the car to the center median, and stopped. I got hold of
the door handle to open the door and pulled. The door shot open, and
the raft exploded out of the car pushing me ahead of it. When I got to
my feet, the first thing I saw was the OHP cop laughing so hard he had
tears running down his cheeks, and having a hard time breathing.

I managed to get the deflate mechanism activated and the raft started
to deflate. By this time the cop was breathing again and somewhat
coherent. He came over and told me that was the funniest thing he had
ever seen. I asked if I was going to get a ticket? He said no, he
just wanted to make sure no one got hurt. We folded the raft as best
we could and went back to my place. The real fun was trying to
convince my insurance company that all that glass damage really was
because a life raft had inflated inside the car. They did payoff, but
only after the insurance adjuster had talked to the OHP cop. I can
look back on this now and laugh. But for about 5 years after that
happened, anytime someone (Jason usually) mentioned it, all I could do
was turn red in the face.