My friend Richie has done some absolutely stupid things in the years that I have known him.
She once downed an entire bottle of vodka and a single hour span of time and had to be rushed to hospital and have her stomach pumped to avoid dying from alcohol poisoning.
A few weeks later she decided to take up mountain climbing with nothing more than a few hours of Youtube videos under her belt for experience. She had a lot of fun before making what other climbers would refer to as a “rookie mistake,” and ended up falling from 40 feet in the air. She was fortunate to be caught by a tree on the way down and was able to reclaim it in a few weeks. You’d guess that an experience akin to that would change your mindset completely when it comes to the risks you take, but it didn’t for Richie. Recently she made a large and extravagant mistake by driving her truck onto a frozen lake to go ice fishing. In Richie’s defense, she’s not the only woman who does this every year. Some people drive their entire campers onto the ice, assuming that it’s at least 2-3 feet thick. But Richie had just fixed the broken gas furnace in her truck and was ignoring local warnings that said the ice was too thin for vehicles. She drove her truck out onto the ice and was good at first. She unloaded her temporary ice fishing shack and got her component out of the truck when she heard what sounded prefer a small bomb go off as the ice collapsed beneath her truck. She had to call 911 and nearly got pulled into the icy water herself. Worst of all—insurance claims for vehicles lost to ice are instantly denied. She had just fixed her truck’s heating method and now it was stuck in a partially frozen lake.