You've probably all seen them, right? The bad guys are chasing the good guys, or the good guys are chasing the bad guys, and they come to the narrow rope bridge spanning the deadly chasm, and there's the dramatic sword fight, with people forced single file, and people put their foot through a plank and fall screaming down to the raging depths below and someone chops off one end of the bridge with a sword or an ax or something and the whole thing falls to dangle from the other end and the good guys have to tenaciously climb their way back up while avoiding more bad guys falling screaming to the raging depths below...
Jeeze guys! Do you have any idea how much time it takes to MAKE one of these things?!
I mean, it's not like we can pop into our local department store and buy one chasm spanning rope bridge, 200 feet, is it?
We have to make the rope bridge BY HAND. Every knot, every plank tied in place. By hand.
And where do you think the rope comes from? UUUMMMMM... the local department store? Bzzzt! We have to braid, or twist, or weave, or whatever the heck it is that we do to make rope... BY HAND.
And what about the PLANKS? Do THEY come from our local department store? UUUMMMM... guess what... WE DON'T HAVE ANY DEPARTMENT STORES!
So we have to saw and sand the planks BY HAND. And where does the wood come from to make the planks? From... our local hardware store?? And where do the saws and sanding blocks come from? uuurrUUUMMM... also from the hardware store? HA HA NO HARDWARE STORES EITHER! So we make the saws and chop down the trees -- can you guess? BY HAND!
ok. So here we are, on our side of the deadly chasm, our shiny new and painfully built rope bridge in hand. All we have to do is toss a rope to our guy on the other side, and haul the bridge across... and how does our guy get to the other side? Without a bridge?
Oh right. He climbs down the deadly chasm, crosses the raging depths, climbs back up the other side. No prob.
Took us four tries last time. Now, by "four tries" I don't mean that the first three guys climbed down, stuck their toe in the water, and
said "eeek! that's too cold for me!". No, I mean lost. Gone. Fell down, or swept away, or fell down and swept away. Dead as a doornail.
The next time you come across a rope bridge, please, we make them for a reason. I can't remember the reason right now because we keep getting terrorized by the bad guys and rescued by the good guys all the time but it's an important reason. It's so our children can walk barefoot to the school that we inexplicably built on the other side of the deadly chasm or something like that.
So, seriously. Next time you come to a rope bridge, skip the whole battle thing and just jump in chasm. Or jump in the chasm and then fight, I don't care. Just leave our poor bridge alone. OK? Thanks!
