
The Failure by susy derkins
December 13th, 2007 8:48 AMUp and up and up
INSTRUCTIONS: Climb a structure at least thirty feet in height.
Humanitarian Crisis participants must wave a flag reading: FREEDOM
and I thought that I could get away with climbing my office building. I mean, if you walk up seven floors of stairs, the last ones feel painfully like climbing, including the getting dizzy part. (Yeah, I know, waaay too meek, compared with the level of climbing that goes on around here...)
Since I really liked hanging a pink ribbon, it was much more exciting to hang a flag. A big pink flag. Reading FREEDOM and all. (Well, I was going to write FREEDOM on it eventually).
I started by getting the cord and the pulley and to find out and make the right knots to tie the flag to the cord. (That took several days).
I took the flag to work on a glorious morning, waited for the right moment for its hanging and ended up doing it at the worst moment with several coworkers around who gave me worried looks (worried for my mental health, I guess) but otherwise within an atmosphere of "don´t ask, don´t tell".
I was extatic when going out with my camera to document the impossibly cool pink flag proudly waving in the middle of the otherwise dull building, a song of freedom in movement, passersby stopping to marvel at it, people in the building rushing to the windows wondering why such a crowd downstairs... Well, it wasn´t like that. In fact, I had trouble finding the flag, pink and all. It looked tiny and sad, flat against the glass.
And then I noticed that just in front of me was a perfectly decent climbable structure, from which the task could have been acomplished properly. It was a direct hit: "look, this over here, on the billboard ladder could be a decent completion, and that barely visible piece of pink cloth over there, is your completion... Just fill in the blanks: f-a-i-l-u-r-e-!.

The flag with the cord and pulley. Of course you can´t see them, but there are three different kinds of knots in total. The brown things lying near the lower right corner are snailshells for scale.

I thought about taking it to work like this but that didn´t work out either: 30 miles of dragging over pavement would have beaten it up pretty bad.
5 vote(s)
Terms
(none yet)5 comment(s)
Yeah, and I´ll try to make more successful failures in the future too.
I fully sympathize with your "this is gonna be awesome" mental image...so many things start that way;). Even though it hasn't caused a complete halt of traffic and onlookers it's quite neat.
...but mainly because of the way you wrote it up (the tasking itself was actually reasonably successful). You definitely captured, as Flitworth says, that beaten-down, letdown feeling that comes after dashed excitement and expected greatness.
Agreed all around. I know well the large plans that just don't quite turn out nearly so awesome as imagined.
We will see a flag from that billboard, though, right?
A reasonably successful failure. Shouldn't stop you from doing it again better though!