During the summer I work at a rope course, which, in Georgia, is like being stuck in your own special circle of hell*. It’s like the sun is looking down on you– you personally—and, I promise you, going to a higher level does not make it less hot. If anything, it just lets the sun get a closer view.
After three summers of working there, I’ve noticed a thing—a vortex-y thing. You see, this rope course is built into three levels (cleverly named 1,2 and 3) that are stacked on top of each other. Level 1 is the lowest and easiest and 3 is the highest and hardest.
As a part time employee, I do my best to avoid hard work, which mainly means avoiding level 3 and level 2 on a busy day. However, one unfortunate day in July, I was told to go watch level 3. Working on level 3 isn’t actually that hard, mostly you watch people climb their way up, watch them look over the edge, and watch them walk back down. Pansies make my job easy. In Georgia, though, every step closer to the sun is like taking a step further into hell. Your skin begins to sizzle on ground level, and level 3 is forty feet above that.
The three circles of hell... in mid-July at least.
Anyway, it was on this fateful day on this damned course level, that I graduated from glasses-losing novice to supreme-overlord-master of glasses losing. Yeah.
So I walked up to this course level and leaned back on my rope, watched a couple of fifth graders dare each other to keep going through the course. Then, as if being up on this level-of-flames wasn’t enough, I hear a whistle. My manager used a whistle—some fancy little whistle he got from Sports Authority—to get my attention and circled his hand above is head… Yeah, for the guests a probably looked like some crazy dude miming a lasso. For me, though, that meant do some safety checks.
Safety checks just involve walking through the course and making sure there aren’t any loose screws, but, on level 3, every movement makes you break out into a sweat. So, as I’m doing safety checks, I am drenched—it begins to look like I’ve actually done some work… while at work.
But as I’m doing these checks, my glasses start to fog up, from all the sweat and the heat and breathing. Simply put:
Sweat + heat+ breathing= fog in lenses
Really, the breathing contributes to both the condensation in the air and the heat, so it's be closer to this:
Sweat(as a function of breathing and humidity) +
Heat(as a function of temperature and breathing)
= Fog...
Since I’m all near-sighted and stuff, I figure don’t need glasses to do safety checks. As I go to take them off, though, I fumble.
The glasses fall and fall until I can’t see them anymore.
Later on, when a coworker and I were looking for them, however, they weren’t on the ground below level 3. Then we checked level 2, because level 2 is right under level 3, so they must be there, right? No. They weren’t there. Level 1 seemed a little less likely than level 2, but whatever. We looked. They weren’t there either. No.
They weren’t on the ground, on the levels, on my face… anywhere. They were gone. Vanished. Disappeared. *Poof*.
I, with my amazing investigative powers, have figured out where they went. I know what happened to my glasses.
Using the latest scientific technology equipment stuff**, I have discovered that between level 2 and level 3, there is a five foot space that is secretly a vortex. Yeah.
The vortex is visible for illustration purposes. In real life, it's invisible.
Before they go into the course, we tell people that they shouldn’t have anything in their pockets because it could fall out of their pockets and hit someone lower down… what we don’t say, is that it could fall into a vortex and end up somewhere on Jupiter or Gallifrey***.
So, after destroying two pairs of glasses, my third pair fell through a vortex-of-doom never to be seen again.
I think the moral of this story is that, if you’re going to work in hell, you should wear contacts.
*5 points if you get the reference to The Inferno
**When I say “latest scientific technology equipment stuff”, I mean my eyes.
** *10 points if you got the Dr. Who reference. Add 20 points if you’re thinking that Gallifrey was destroyed, so your glasses wouldn’t end up there. Subtract 10 points if you’re thinking that Gallifrey didn’t exist in the first place…
I Broke My Glasses Again 