A man jumping, apparently successfully. Photo via Flickr user sabrina’s stash
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So here’s how I understand the situation: You are a college student at the University of Pittsburgh. You—and this is from local news reports—met a girl sometime during what turned out to be a fairly intense Monday night. You’re out wandering Forbes Avenue, a strip of mostly closed FedExes and restaurants. OK. So far so good. This is about as close to being the main character of a modern country-rock song as you’re likely to get. You, the girl, the night, liquid courage in your veins, the city stretched out in front of you. The possibilities are endless, well maybe not endless, but you are thinking there is a good chance you will have sex that night at least.
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Now to seal the deal you take her to a roof of a nearby building. Hm, OK, interesting move. Then you want to impress her—alright, following you so far—so you jump from that roof to the next, or you try to. Huh, well. I’ll let the website of Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 describe the result:
“A Pitt student trying to impress a date tried to jump between two buildings in Oakland and ended up becoming stuck in a space about 16-18 inches wide… Emergency responders spent several hours working to rescue the man, including cutting holes through the wall of a Qdoba restaurant… A paramedic was lowered by rope to reach the man, who was rescued at about 6 AM and taken away in an ambulance. He was believed to have an ankle injury.”
Now, I have some questions for you:
1. Are you OK?
2. How did you get to the roof in the first place? Was it your roof? Did you sneak into a building more or less at random just to sneak up there?
3. How drunk, on a scale of 1 to College Student Having a Very Late Monday Night, were you at this point?
4. What was the conversation like on top of the roof? Did you immediately start bragging about your long-jumping ability, or did she start talking about her ex who was a really good jumper, or what exactly was the chain of events here?
5. Why do you think that women are impressed by a man’s ability to jump long distances? Is this a PUA thing? Is there a YouTube seduction guru out there who has a video called “Oh Yeah Guys Also You Know One Thing Women Love? Jumping.” Is there a whole generation of young ladies who think Super Mario is really sexy?
6. Or was this whole thing because you got really pumped by the one-centimeter victory of US Olympian Jeff Henderson in the long jump? Because I understand that it was a pretty exciting event, but he trained for years to be able to make that 8.38-meter jump, and he did not spend the past several hours dong Fireball shots or whatever it is you were doing.
7. OK, speaking of long jumping, I hate to bring this up because of all that you’ve been through, but I looked on Google Maps to see how big this gap between roofs you were trying to jump was, and… well, I gotta tell you, it doesn’t look all that significant.
Screenshot via Google Maps
Was this a “jump” or more of a “fall”? Be honest.
8. When during the several hours you spent wedged between the walls did you sober up? And were you able to reach your phone so you at least had something to do? Or were you just sitting between two buildings, staring at the wall?
9. Now that we’re on the subject, did you have to go to the bathroom at any point during that ordeal? That might be the worst part—not the humiliation when you fell, not the physical injuries, not the fear that you would have to eventually saw off your arm or something a la 127 Hours, but the full bladder you were probably stuck with while you sat between buildings.
10. Were the teams of trained professionals who rescued you respectful, or was there a lot of those humiliating stares older men give younger men who have done something very stupid and now need an adult’s help? Was that actually the worst part?
11. Are you going to pay for that Qdoba’s wall or what? Jesus, I just realized—are you going to have to ask your parents to pay for the wall the fire department broke through because of your failed courtship jump?
12. Have you messaged the girl yet? Or is it taking you a little time to find the right words to express that perfect combination of contrition, give-no-fucks charm, and an assertion that no, really, you can jump a lot farther than that?
13. You obviously care a lot about your jumping ability—is the worst part actually that now this girl thinks you are bad at jumping?
14. Are you glad that news reports didn’t name you, or are you secretly a little bummed that you aren’t famous now? Couldn’t you parlay this sort of infamy into, at the very least, a few sponsored Vines where you try to jump over things and hilariously fail? If you had some kind of income stream going from viral videos, maybe you could pay for the wall repair.
15. Are you OK? I hope you are OK.
Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.
