| Climbing live towers I remember back when I was in college, I went home and visited the radio station where I worked during the summer. They had just moved to a new tower, and the owner was telling me about the very strange guys that worked on the tower crew. When they were about to take the antenna up the tower, he asked them if they were ready for him to call the other station that was already up there to have them shut down their transmitter, a common safety procedure. The guy he asked said that wouldn't be necessary and explained that RF radiation used to bother him, but he'd gotten used to it, and it didn't bother him anymore.
What, had he changed into some sort of radiation-absorbing mutant or something? As I recall, he was described as only having one ear and walking around in his bare feet, so maybe he had.
In any case, jumping off a tower is incredibly stupid, akin to surfing in the waves caused by a hurricane. First, you're going to get a very unhealthy dose of RF energy, and second, if the wind gets your parachute, it could blow you into the tower. Actually, that would be the better alternative, since someone might at least be able to climb the tower to get you down. A more dangerous possibility is that you'll end up snagged on a guy wire, in which case, I'm not sure how anyone is going to retrieve you without a crane, which can be extremely difficult to get out to the tower site on short notice.
So I'll have to agree with an earlier post, as well as a friend of mine. I've heard him say many times after putting someone back together in the OR, "I can't fix stupid." I suppose that natural selection is still at work, weeding these morons out of the gene pool. |
