In Public Service Announcements for Idiots, Part One, I shared with you all my joy at discovering the aroma of melted packing tape. That was Monday. My partners thankfully delayed anymore joyful experiments until Thursday. We have a symposium on Thursday nights for all the other students that were insane enough to take this class. After symposium, we decided to "test" the prototype we had created for this assignment. As we are not allowed to use the Drury University pool, because understandably they don't want to have to clean any more cardboard out of the filter than they will have to after our Regatta next week, we decided to go to Doling Park.
Doling Park has a nice big pond. Full of scum. And weeds, and ducks, and geese, and God knows what else. It was also about 40 degrees by the time we arrived and chose our launching point. I was fairly certain at this point that I was going to die. I was going to drown, become entangled in some object in the water, procure a brain injury from a hidden underwater protrusion, or I was simply going to sink, get pneumonia, and die 10d6 days later. Put simply, I was petrified. I was trusting two pieces of loosely assembled cardboard, and two 20 year old college students to keep me from certain death. Damn right I was petrified.
Meet Caleb
Now Caleb is well built, strong, and did absolutely nothing to assuage my fear of death.
Meet Alex
Alex is smart, stronger than me at least, and did even less to assuage my fear of death as he suggested to Caleb that they toss the float (and me) in the lake and see what happens. At this point, I climbed back out of the boat.
We conferred, as we did have to test our prototype before creating our final float, as within one weeks time, we would be placing our float in the Drury pool with everyone else's, and then it will be sink or swim. As in, you sink, you fail. On videotape. Which our professor has informed us he will then be placing on YouTube. So we decided that instead of just randomly throwing me into the lake, they would place our craft between some pipes and the wall surrounding the lake, so that if it did sink or roll over, I would have something to grab onto. I decided this was agreeable. We were worried about the bottom going through as they lifted me into the water the most, but it held. And I was afloat!
The float hit the water at precisely 8pm. My feet were already frozen. (I had worn flip-flops because I did not want to ruin any of my real shoes should I get wet, which I fully expected.)
After testing that I was truly able to balance without rollover and that the craft was not leaning against the walls for support, Alex and Caleb released me. It held.I stayed in the craft for about 30 minutes without moving, and the craft still held. No leaks, no rollover, but I was getting rather uncomfortable. I decided to make a phone call.
My husband wasted no time ensuring that I inform my teammates that if they let me drown he would hunt them down and kill them. We talked for a bit, and I also called my friends Jerry and Steve, and also my friend Theresa, to let them know that I had not, in fact, drowned, at least not yet.By quarter of nine, my body was screaming in protest, so I decided to stretch my legs.
Not exactly a flattering view, but considering the picture was taken by a male college student, I'm not sure what I expected. It was nice to stretch my legs, since as long as I was still floating they were refusing to pull me out of the water.By 9 o'clock, I was so cold, I couldn't have felt a leak if my life depended on it, and I really had to go to the bathroom. I guess I sounded truly convincing this time, as Alex and Caleb finally agreed that it was time to go. We only had to worry about how to distribute my weight to get me out without ending up in the drink anyway. After an hour in the water, I got a little cocky, I guess. I just sat up.
I kicked my legs over the sides to the pipe and the wall, and with a hand from Caleb, I stood up, free from my prison. I took a bow on wobbly legs.
In the end, I was quite proud of our little craft. The seamless construction kept the water out quite well. Would I have been less terrified had the craft not seemed like a custom built coffin?
Probably not. But I stayed dry, and that made me happy. Will there be a Public Service Announcement Part 3? Knowing me, probably so. Stay tuned!
