Thursday, April 05, 2007

The High Ropes


The department I work in incorporates outdoor education. The outdoor ed lecturers are generally of a certain kind. They are all men, they all wear fleeces with no brand name, they all rarely shave, they all swear a lot and they all are called Barry.

The outdoor ed people run the high ropes course. The high ropes are a set of telegraph poles with ropes strung between where teams of people are encouraged to climb up, walk across and jump off while attached to a rope with an outdoor ed lecturer at the other end in case people fall off (which they do frequently). The job of holding the ropes at ground level requires a reasonable strong and heavy lecturer the whole time a person is on the ropes. (I lifted a Barry a couple of feet of the ground when I jumped from the top pole)

A few of us where in the canteen the other day (we seem to spend a lot of time there), talking about various session that we had done. Barry told us that he had recently taken a psychology group on the ropes the previous day. He said a student had climbed to the top of a pole and was having a problem jumping off, the psychology lecturer asked the student how he felt. Barry said he was still holding the rope 45 minutes later while the student explained how she felt. I don't know why I thought this was so funny. I think is was that I knew that Barry holding the rope during this conversation was just saying to himself "Just $£$%%E jump!", but didn't to say anything.

1 comment:

Jay said...

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