• Wanderer@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Not exactly what you want but I heard about people in the military practising things and they learn. “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”

    By doing that it makes you quicker. Sometimes when I’m late and start rushing I end up forgetting things or knocking things over or dropping. So I take a breath and say slow is fast. Also my career history is big on “right first time” doing something twice is a huge waste.

    Also I remember Adam Savage said he got close to death (or was getting close to being rescued from death) then he told himself “Calm people live. Tense people die.” and he managed to free himself.

    Taking a moment might not just save you time or money it might save your life.

    • neidu2@feddit.nl
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      1 month ago

      It was far from a life and death situation, as it was a highly controlled activity.

      But it was meant to mimic a life and death situation for practice: Anyone who travel by helicopter in the North Sea are required to go through this course which includes an emergency water landing drill. It involves sitting inside this thing that is reasonably close to one of the common helicopter models used in the north sea. Same seats, same belts, and similar windows.

      This “simlator” hangs from a crane over a pool. So that you can practice escaping from a ditched helicopter. “Brace brace brace!” dunk
      This is done while wearing a survival suit that has a rebreather. Each passenger has a dedicated scuba frogman to make sure you don’t panic and drown.

      First dunk emulates a successful water landing. Helicopter remains floating for a while, but then goes under. Release window, unclamp, and swim out.

      It gradually increases in fuckery, to the poin where it’s emulating a helicopter that goes under right away and flips around as it does.

      I’m fairly light weight, so this survival suit gives me a lot of buoyancy, and this collar-like thing around my neck tended to catch on the window as I was going through. In the beginning, this was not a problem, but it became a pretty big one on the last test.

      The disorientation from being flipped made it hard to compensate for the extra buoyancy, so I got stuck, upside down in the water. I immediately knew what happened, but I remained calm, moved back a little bit. With one hand to keep track of the window, I used my other hand to pretty much pack and squeeze collar as close to my neck as possible, preventing it from catching. There was no panic, but there was a slight worry that the frogman hadn’t intervened. Thanks to the rebreather I could stay pretty calm and focus on what needed to be done to get through the window.

      When I reached the surface the frogman explained that he saw that I was having some problems, but decided to let me continue, as he saw that I was calm and reasonably in control. In a real scenario such as this, panic would’ve killed me.

      Slow is smooth. Smooth is survivable.

    • png
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      1 month ago

      Also works well for downhill mountainbiking. Repeating “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” helps avoid sketchy situations through gnarly/dangerous terrain.