Today’s post comes from Bathtub Safety Officer Rafferty.

At ease, civilians! But don’t be lulled into a false sense of security!

And as I say that, I realize it’s redundant because “false” is the only “sense of security” brand on the shelves these days.

Nothing is secure!

Look at what an isolated foreign potentate was able to do without leaving his hermit kingdom – he cancelled our plan to go to the movies! That’s a level of meddling in the personal entertainment lives of Americans that I thought was reserved only for the FBI or the Mall of America Police.

And now comes word that there are people actually working in an organized way to try to build Elon Musk’s extremely scary Hyperloop, a high-speed transportation system akin to those pneumatic tubes that they use to move money, paperwork, and out-of-ink pens back and forth from the bank’s drive-up teller to your car.

As your Bathtub Safety Officer, I’ve made it clear I’m totally against this idea.

As I said in my earlier post:

“Even if everything is OK on the journey from point A to point B, what about the people who handle the tube when it arrives at its destination? During the heyday of pneumatic office communication, the weak link always happened in the basement where all the tubes ended and various boobs and imbeciles fumbled to open the capsules and spilled the precious contents onto a dank cement floor. Or at least that’s how I picture it.”

The Hyperloop planners have considered this very thing, and according to the above article, they’ve lavished their attention on the sticky problem of what happens when Hyper-pod arrives at its station.

“So the team decided on what it calls a ‘bubble strategy.’ There’s the swanky capsule, the one with fancy doors and windows, that pulls into the station. It’s the ‘bubble.’ Passengers get in, and that capsule enters an outer shell as it’s loaded into the tube. The outer shell is built to handle the ride, and has the air compressor and other needed bits.”

Now I’m even more concerned. The thought of riding in a “bubble” that’s inside an “outer shell” that goes 800 miles per hour gets me thinking about the metal ball rattles around inside cans of spray paint.

No illustrations needed!

I have been told that I sometimes over-react to threats that are not real.

Maybe the Hyperloop is one of those cases and nothing will come of it. There are so many potential obstacles to the establishment of system that promotes human travel-by-tube, it will probably not happen in our shockingly brief lifetimes. Earthquakes, rising ocean levels or killer bees could quickly take take this, and every other option, off the table.

Or maybe with the growth of the internet and fully immersive high-definition virtual realities, the whole idea of physical travel to distant locations will begin to seem quaint. We may decide that going anywhere at all is not only too risky – it’s unnecessary.

Especially when you consider how easy it is to keep us from going to the movies!

Yours in Safety,
B.S.O.R.

What does it take to keep you at home?