Hilarious Irony

[jeshyr]

I have had wonderful AFO ankle braces for the past year or so, which really help a lot with my perpetually-sprained hypermobile ankles. I don't wear them all the time though because I don't like wearing shoes full stop. So when my ankles get bad I wear them more, and when it's really hot or my ankles are less bad I wear them less.

Yesterday, in a fit of hilarious irony, I hurt my foot/ankle ...

... by tripping over my AFOs.

In between wincing and saying 'ouch' a lot, I am laughing my head off!!

r

Comments

[acelightning]

yep, that is funny, in a twisted sort of way :-)

sometime in the previous millennium, there was a massive power outage that affected most of the northeastern US. the New York Stock Exchange, already relying on primitive mainframe computers, realized that they'd better be prepared for the next such incident. they got a custom-made backup power supply installed, ready to take up the load. sure enough, there was another huge blackout. and the first thing that failed was the power supply. (they got a new one immediately afterwards - and tested it, this time.)

i know of a lot of such incidents. a fire-suppressant system on an airplane malfunctioned and caused a fire. an anti-motion-sickness drug made me dizzy and nauseous. air bags, which are intended to prevent injuries in a car crash, routinely cause injuries, sometimes more severe ones than the crash itself would have. computer anti-virus programs decide that the operating system is a virus, and try to delete it. it's impossible to make anything truly fool-proof; fools are too ingenious :-D

[feyandstrange]

Sadly, building-size backup power supplies fail on a pretty regular basis; they're just not easy to make good ones that will tolerate not working most of the time.

[feyandstrange]

Oh yay, I'm not the only one who's irony-clumsy-prone. I tripped over my crutches at least twice (like, spectacularly enough to cause pratfalls and injury, I don't count the boring ones) when I was on crutches for nine months. Once the bolt came out of the part that holds the whole crutch together while I was crutching and it just folded under me. I think crutches were more dangerous than skis.

I've only once managed to run over my own toe with my wheelchair, but I think they design really hard to prevent that.

[acelightning]

they weren't intending to run the entire building on it - just the computers and probably the phones. the building management itself had backup that powered emergency lights and other vital systems (not the elevators, for example).

and i worked in a radio station in NYC that had a magnificently designed power backup system. now, again, this wasn't for the entire building, only the radio station - but it took care of the lights on the floors occupied by the station, as well as all the audio and radio gear, clocks, phones, etc., that were needed for the station to operate. it started with what looked like a room full of automobile batteries laid out on the floor and connected together. when the power was okay, it kept the batteries at full charge. as soon as it started to drop, circuitry in the room caused those batteries to put out a perfect imitation of mains power, without a moment's bobble, so the equipment just kept operating as if nothing was wrong. meanwhile, a diesel generator was automatically switched on. the batteries kept everything running until the generator had come up to operating speed and its output was smooth, then seamlessly switched over to the generator. i think there was at least two days' worth of diesel fuel on hand. and all of the machinery was on the 13th floor (designated as a "mechanical floor" so as not to have to skip 13 because of superstitious people who didn't want their offices on the 13th floor), so it was well above any possible flooding. and the entire setup was thoroughly tested once every month.

that was 40 years ago, and i wonder why nobody uses a system like that any more. everything is sloppy; backups don't come online for minutes to hours instead of instantly, or they're in basements where the water shorts them out before they can be of any use, or nobody ever checks to see if there's enough fuel for the generators, or the switches haven't been checked in so long that they fail. surely modern technology can duplicate the simple, sure backups i helped test 40 years ago... *sigh*