Here is a video showing how a construction worker was rescued from a burning building. He seems to have shown considerable presence of mind, buying time by jumping from one ledge to another as the fire came closer. The whole thing has a voiceover, perhaps from the person doing the recording. She actually said at one point, “OMG!”. Do people actually use such initialisms in conversation?
And while we are watching disaster videos, here is one showing the train jumping off the tracks and going up the escalator at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.
Good thing firefighters aren’t like cops; they’d stop what they were doing and harass people for pointing cameras at them while they were being all heroic and stuff.
Bonus text overlays to the lower video:
and
(Believe it or not, I’ve never been arrested for anything -- yet. Maybe the Google/gov’t database overlap shows a surprise in my future…)
I miss so much by not having a tv…
@1 Marcus
It may be worth pointing out (as I’ve seen others making such comparisons elsewhere) that firefighters have no reason to be like cops. There’s no reward for it and likely more cost as well.
I saw that elsewhere earlier today. What I noticed most was the firefighter on the ladder, angrily and frantically gesticulating to the crane operator to move closer and lower the extension. The operator didn’t seem to be paying enough attention.
Re: OMG. Yes. I am 35, and this is one of the first signs for me that the torch has passed to another generation. Kids today: Their music? Their hair? Their clothes? Sure, I think all of those things are pretty cool. (I think the 00s was a mediocre decade for music, but the 10s are shaping up to be pretty interesting, IMO) Even the incessant staring into cell phones, and the preference for texting over talking — I see this as an extension of things that were pioneered in my generation, and actually, since I was in a cadre of kids who found it easier to open up emotionally to their peers via messages posted on BBSes than in real life, I see this as almost a vindication of my angst-ridden teenage years, the “geeks shall inherit the earth” principle in action.
But actually saying “O-M-G”? I don’t get it.
(Although… now that I think about it, we did say “W-T-F” aloud at times… but that’s sorta different, because you generally wouldn’t say that in company where it would be acceptable to say “What the fuck”. Oh, I did have a friend who liked to say “whiskey tango foxtrot”, I thought that was clever. Heh, maybe I’ll start saying “Omicron Mu Gamma” just to confuse everyone.)
Yes, my daughter verbally says O-M-G. We try to discourage it, partly because you don’t want to gratuitously offend anyone, but mostly because it makes you sound like an airhead.
At work “WTF” has been recast as “What’s That For?”. It works just as well in most situations.