Years ago I went camping occasionally with some friends. I was on the periphery of this group of guys, but a story from one of our trips must be told.
It was the day they created a game I call Blind Man’s Find the Gas Rag.
These men were hilarious. They were always coming up with new ways to entertain themselves by being hardcore. That was probably the impetus behind their Man Olympics.
Each year an Olympics organizer would come up with ever more ridiculous stunts to attempt. A maze made out of ribbons attached to trees through a forest, featuring a flagstone at the end of the course you were expected to heft as far as possible. (Points for lowest time in maze and farthest distance with rock.) A giant memory game stretched across a pasture.
And my favorite, the one that takes a little more explanation: Blind Man’s Find the Gas Rag.
The idea was that the contestant would be blindfolded and driven to one edge of a cow pasture. The truck would make its way to the other end of the pasture, where a gasoline-soaked rag would be tied to the top of a post. The contestant was to travel as quickly as possible to locate the rag, using smell and dumb luck.
Yes, it was a really silly idea. Yes, we were really excited to play.
At the honking of the truck horn the game commenced. Contestant Number 1 put both arms in front of him and began running in the direction he thought would give him victory. Running at a good clip, mind you.
See, he was counting on one other rule in the game to help him out: If he got near to out of bounds, the referee would alert him using a walky-talky.
We began to see him lope closer and closer to a geographical feature you don’t see on PGA courses: a 6-foot embankment, at the bottom of which was a briar patch in a cow pond.
The referee began to hail our champion: “Boundary.”
The champion didn’t slow down a bit.
He tried the walky-talky again: “Boundary.”
Both arms in front of him, all heart, the contestant continued to run.
That’s when we realized the walky-talkies were out of range.
The referee began madly honking the truck horn and screaming, “BOUNDARY! BOUNDARY!”
Our last vision of the athlete was him falling over a short cliff and hearing an ever-so-slight plooosh.
In high school I worked for a doctor’s office. One day the office received a fancy new scale that measured body fat percentage. All the nurses grabbed me when I came I to work that day and demanded I take off my shoes and socks to step on the machine. There was bated breath, and when the scale finally showed a percentage (it was below 1.0), I heard women cuss in ways I had never imagined.
That level of cussing is what we heard from inside the briar patch. No walky-talky needed.
There were a couple of key lessons from that day.
1. If you are going to institute a plan, do a dry run. You just might need to tweak. As professional designers like to say, iterate, iterate, iterate.
2. Just because the plan fails doesn’t mean it’s a loss.
After all, we’re still telling stories about the day one of us ran blindfolded off a cliff into a briar patch in a cow pond.
