My friend Richard has done some really stupid things in the years that I have known him.
He once downed an entire bottle of vodka and a one hour span of time and had to be rushed to hospital and have his stomach pumped to avoid dying from alcohol poisoning. A few months later he decided to take up mountain climbing with nothing more than a few hours of Youtube videos under his belt for experience. He 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. He was lucky to be caught by a tree on the way down and was able to recover in a few months. You’d think that an experience like that would change your mindset completely when it comes to the risks you take, but it didn’t for Richard. Recently he made a massive and expensive mistake by driving his truck onto a frozen lake to go ice fishing. In Richard’s defense, he’s not the only person 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 Richard had just fixed the broken heater in his truck and was ignoring local warnings that said the ice was too thin for vehicles. He drove his truck out onto the ice and was fine at first. He unloaded his temporary ice fishing shack and got his equipment out of the truck when he heard what sounded like a small bomb go off as the ice collapsed beneath his truck. He had to cool 911 and nearly got pulled into the icy water himself. Worst of all—insurance claims for vehicles lost to ice are immediately denied. He had just fixed his truck’s heating system and now it was stuck in a partially frozen lake.