There Are Three Kinds Of Men.....

“There are three kinds of men. The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of us have to pee on the electric fence for ourselves.” Will Rogers.

I am so tired of peeing on that fence.

I’m just about ready to push all my gear together in a pile and set fire to it. Contrary to the opinions of some, I've always thought of myself as a half decent skydiver. And then I started the AFF course. I’ll spare you all the grisly details, but suffice to say that if I was actually going out the door with a student on the 4 jumps so far, if their automatic activation device had failed to fire 2 out of the 4 times I’d be explaining to 2 different families why their father/mother/brother/sister/son was being returned to them in a plastic bag. Even the jumps I didn't manage to kill my student on were far from stellar. On the first one I was giving my student hand signals so fast that it looked like I was a spastic deaf mute with cerebral palsy doing sign language. Even I couldn't figure out what the hell I was trying to tell him. And after every single jump, Bram, our Instructor, comes down all smiles, happiness and roses, high fiving and going on about what a great jump it was. He’s the kind of person that would find themselves at 100 feet over the cesspool, look down, and shout “Yippee! A water jump!!!!” At least I’m not alone. After every jump most of the candidates come staggering back into the packing area pale and shaken, wondering what the hell they were thinking when they signed up for this course.

There are 3 Canadians on this course, and one of them, Joey, is from Eden North in Edmonton. When it came time for him to debrief one particularly bad dive he climbed out the door of the mock-up, reached in, took Bram’s leg grip, prepared to start the recreation of the skydive and said “Okay, here’s where I ran into trouble’. A ripple of nervous laughter went through the group, partly because we all recognized the joke, and partly because we all knew that he wasn't joking.

When I went through the cupboards after moving into my trailer I found a “Baby Desert Eagle” My first thought was “Trailer Defence? Is the Zombie Apocalypse more imminent than I thought?” I’ve revised that train of thought. I’m pretty sure somebody placed one in every trailer to allow miserable, suffering, despondent, aspiring AFF instructors to put an end to their suffering.

 It’s probably not as bad as I make it out to be. I keep getting psyched up for jump after jump with Diane’s words of encouragement echoing in my head “YOU ARE GREAT! YOU ARE TALENTED! YOU ARE A GREAT TEACHER!” She goes on, however most of the rest of what she has to say doesn’t bear repeating in a forum my mother might read. But it did involve scantily clad Chinese cheerleaders, a plastic sheet, baby oil warmed to just above body temperature and….. well, you get the idea.

Bad skydiving isn't like Hell. It doesn't last forever. It just seems that way.