After all conversation about American Idol had been exhausted, my co-worker tells me she and her husband got all caught up in one of those news shows, Dateline or Primetime or whatever the fuck. It was the ultimate tale of survival, and it got me to thinking.
See, the story goes something like this, and since I didn't see it myself I have no idea what actually happened so I'm going to make some shit up that sounds like it's flowing in a logical order:
There's this guy who's a diver, and the ultimate place to go diving is this place in Africa. It's like one of those big ass cave systems like in The Descent or something. So while he's down there, he discovers an enormous cave. He hooks up with a team of African divers to explore it, and they discover a huge lake and a cavern large enough to house the Eiffel Tower.
Unfortunately, the dude dies during one of the dives. His father's all like, that sucks, but he died doing what he loved. His mother's like, fuck that shit, I want his body so I can give him a proper burial. This is no easy task, because dude didn't die in an easily accessible section of the cave.
So they hire another dive team to retrieve the body. Someone somehwere has to be thinking this is a pretty shitty idea, but no, down they go; and because of the way the cave system is constructed, they need to go down single file.
The guy at the very bottom of the pile is for some goddamn reason wearing a camera on his helmet instead of a flashlight. He's holding his flashlight in his hand. He finds the body and has to put it in a sack to have it hauled up. Something goes horrifically wrong (as it always does in situations such as this): he has to let go of the flashlight to bag the body and doesn't see all the lines and tubes and cables getting tangled up, and the bottom guy ends up dying. This is, of course, all caught on tape thanks to the camera on his helmet. The next guy up the line almost doesn't make it himself; it's so touch-and-go that they tell his wife to prepare for the worst. The thing is, because of how far down the cavern is, it takes them an hour or so to get down to it, but it takes almost twelve hours for them to surface because of decompression. But as he's coming up he tells the next guy in line that the guy below him found the kid's body and had it in the bag, and they actually aren't that far down.
So they end up hiring a second dive team to go down, and they are able to retrieve the bodies.
Now here are my evil, evil thoughts: first of all, how fucked up is it that you'd risk other people's lives to retrieve a dead body? Second, this sort of shit happens ALL THE TIME. You hear about it on the news, someone gets trapped on a mountain while they're climbing, the rescue team gets stuck or lost and a second team comes in to get them. Here's my thought:
Why do they never hire the second team first? I mean, if they are SO GOOD at what they do that they're able to rescue stranded people AND the teams send to find them, wouldn't THEY be the go-to guys?
Also, about the phrase, "They died doing what they loved." I had this thought following the Atlanta bus tragedy a few weeks ago, when the baseball players and bus driver died when their bus crashed over an overpass. Many people said the baseball players, en route to a game, died doing what they loved.
I'm like, what, riding on a bus?
No use yelling at me for being a mean bitch, I'm already well aware that I'm going to hell, thank you.
Also, Crank is the bestest movie ever, and Jason Statham is my new imaginary boyfriend.