The Wrong Way to Climb Telephone Polls

As anyone who has been to Japan can tell you, the cities are a mess of wires going everywhere. Unlike the States, which buries most of its telephone wires and electric cables underground, Japan suspends everything from poles in the air.

It is an incredible eyesore, and a frequent complaint from aesthetic minded foreigners. Most Japanese reply that it is necessary because of frequent earthquakes and the quality of Japanese soil. This explanation is debated by Alexander Kerr in “Dogs in Demons”, in which he argues that there is no good reason why Japan can’t bury these cables underground like every other country, and that this is simply another example of Japanese stubbornness and refusal to change.

But I’ll leave the aesthetics alone for now, as it really has nothing to do with this story.

I was in Gifu city with a couple of Japanese friends, and we were walking past a telephone poll, when I noticed I could just about touch the lowest handgrip.

The telephone polls have various hand and foot grips that are sticking out along the side of it, so that a maintenance man can climb up to the top if there is a problem. But, to prevent random people from climbing up and putting themselves in danger, the grips don’t begin until a few meters in the air. To reach the first grip, you need a ladder.

“But,” I thought as I walked past, “this was designed for Japanese people. They weren’t counting on someone as tall as me.” When I stood on my tiptoes, I could just barely touch the first grip, but not quite get my hand all the way around it. If I jumped, I was confident I could grab the whole thing.

I don’t know what I was thinking really. The next grip on the opposite side was even higher up, so I would only be able to get my hand around one grip. I would need at least two to pull myself up. In fact, even if I had two, I might be able to do a pull up and get my chin to the same level, but I’d never be able to pull up my whole body. The most I could have hoped to do would be to hang by one hand for a short time before letting go. In fact, even before I jumped I had sort of a preminiscent feeling of the pain in my shoulder that would be caused by the sharp jerk of my body weight suddenly supported by one arm. And yet I jumped up and grabbed the grip anyway.

I guess my mind was just in the sort of dream like cloud that sometimes causes us to have incredible lapses of judgment. I tend to spend a lot of time in this cloud.

I jumped up, grabbed the grip, and felt the sharp pain in my shoulder as my body came back down again and the whole weight of it was suddenly thrust on that joint. Then my hand slid off the grip.

The big problem was that the grip consisted of many miniature plastic spikes designed to prevent slipping. As my hand slid off them, it tore off bits of skin.

Coming back to the ground, I immediately came out of my cloud and realized how stupid I had been. I was too embarrassed to let anyone else see I had injured myself, and so I did my best to conceal my palm throughout the rest of the evening.

When I finally parted from my friends, I had a chance to look at my palm. It actually wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. Just a couple places where the skin had been rubbed a little raw and was bleeding, but that was it.

Of course, with bloody hands, you’re pretty useless. No one wants to loan you anything. I put a bunch of band-aids on my hands for the next day of school.

I was past the embarrassed stage now, and beginning to see the humor in the situation. When teachers at school asked me what happened, I did my best to describe it accurately. I didn’t know the words for “handgrip” or “telephone poll”, so I drew pictures on the board, and did my imitation of me jumping up and trying to climb the telephone poll. Everyone got a good laugh out of that story. And some of the students gave me cartoon character band-aids, so everything turned out okay in the end.

Link of the Day
A great new way to waste time: this web page has a program that exploits the defaults of electronic translaters by translating a phrase back and fourth ten times over.

For instance Dicken's classic "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" becomes...
"The time is, the this chronometers the thing more better possible,when it is falschsten"