Milton, ON – Earlier this week, local software engineer Dave Winchester triumphantly confirmed in his own mind how he would safely get down from a three story building.
While attending a Die Hard viewing marathon, Winchester took a break to admire the host’s balcony view, noticing a rather tall building nearby. At the expense of conversation for the rest of the evening, Winchester meticulously planned how he would return to the ground if he found himself stranded on that roof.
“The first part was easy,” said Winchester, wiping sweat from his brow generated simply from the act of eating popcorn. “I would carefully crabwalk down the roof to the gutter, hang my body over the side, then swing around and drop to the second-floor patio.”
Winchester, who never saw an escalator he didn’t like, was careful to point out that he is aware of the common imaginary mistake of trusting a flimsy rain gutter to hold a grown computer programmer’s frame. “I wouldn’t put my full weight on it, I’d use my momentum in swinging over to do a forward flip instead.”
From there, knowing that any idiot could shimmy down a drainpipe, Winchester had something more complicated in mind. “See that guard rail? I’d tie my jacket to that like a rope, then hang down to drop to the ground.”
Of course, with summer approaching and a possible scenario where he was without jacket, Winchester outlined his backup plan: “I noticed a bush about 15 feet away from the building that would cushion my fall if I took a running leap Trinity from The Matrix. Sure it would still hurt a bit, but on the bright side, the mild weather would make my muscles more liquid, and I could get down a few seconds faster,” he advised as he stifled a burp from too many Dr. Peppers.
Winchester acknowledged that the 30 minutes he spent on this mental exercise was fully worth missing the climax of Die Hard with a Vengeance. “I can watch a movie anytime,” said Winchester. “This is life or death.”
At press time, Winchester’s wife had given up asking him to join her for a complimentary spinning class.
