Ah. Serves me right for composing posts, fucking off for dinner then coming back and blindly posting them. Well, kudos to the Sheriff for reconsidering. At the very least this deserves investigation.
Yeah, me too. I think I pretty much just posted the same Sheriff info twice. :smack:
I listened to that link and while the nurse was not very adament about the dangers, it is crystal clear that the DJs were aware of he potential of harm. They can’t excuse it by saying that nobody would think that there could be harm from this. They knew of the Chico case and they failed to warn contestants of the harm and failed to render aid. The fraternity brothers were convicted of felony involuntary manslaughter and a similar potential punishment seems reasonable here.
Never mind; I had a very nice thai curry in the interim. I trust your cellphone was equally tasty. 
Here is a link to the article.
bloody :mad:
/trying very hard to remain objective
it appears that the DJs honestly thought that water intoxication is more towards ‘freak accident’ than … ah to hell with that.
Dude, it’s a toy. Regardless of price or availability, the plain and simple fact is that she threw her life away over a fucking toy. So the things are nigh-impossible to find right now and her kids have to wait a few months before getting one. So what? The widdle pweciouses weren’t going to shrivel up and die from video game deprivation. No toy is worth dying over, full stop, end of story. No toy is even worth giving yourself a bladder infection or wetting your pants over.
People point out the price tag not because she could have just gone to the store and gotten one right now, but because this wasn’t the only way her children could ever have a Wii. It’s a low enough price point that most people who couldn’t just buy the thing could start saving now and have the money available by the time the machine becomes more readily available. Lame or not, there’s a difference between dying for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and dying for gotta-have-it-nownowNOW.
Except she didn’t know she was throwing her life away. She thought she was drinking a lot of water and holding her bladder. That sounds quite reasonable for a $250 toy.
Dick-fuck jocks, on the other hand, knew that lots of water might be bad for you. They carried on with the whole thing regardless.
No there isn’t. You are dead.
“Quite reasonable”? Are you fucking with me? Holding a large amount of urine in your bladder despite the pain it causes, running a very real risk of giving yourself a bladder infection (which is utterly, utterly miserable, in case you’ve never had one), maybe suffering the embarrassment of pissing your pants in public…is “quite reasonable” for a toy?
I think it’s a symptom of seriously fucked-up priorities, myself. Always have. I remember watching the news reports about the Cabbage Patch Kid riots when I was a kid and thinking, “What the hell is wrong with these people? Don’t they know it’s just a stinking doll? There’ll probably be a boatload of them in stores after Christmas.” And twenty years ago, that seemed to be the prevailing attitude–that these people willing to go to such extremes for a toy were, well, just nuts. But now, people seem to accept that as perfectly normal behavior. It worries me what that says about us and the direction we’re headed as a society.
Once again, she’s female. She knows that one of the very common tests that women undergo is an abdominal ultrasound, which involves drinking water to discomfort. She was no more ‘desperate’ or stupid than the woman who ‘won’ and survived, who thought it would be a bit of a lark with the fun of getting a prize at the end.
It’s vile that people are excoriating this poor woman because she made the same innocent mistake that all the other contestants made. The difference is that the rest of them suffered symptoms that caused them to stop and, for whatever reason, she either didn’t or soldiered on beyond them.
Had you ever had an ultrasound and sat awaiting the technician with your own belly bulging and bladder aching, you would not be so quick to condemn her.
It’s not as though she willingly agreed to be dropped off a highrise without a parachute. The contest involved drinking too much water - exactly the same thing that a very common medical test does.
Didn’t the contest organizers see the Simpsons ep where Grandpa’s kidneys exploded from doing this?
Also, any real radio station has a legal team who approves all things, including contests. Howard Stern bitches all the time about how this or that contest was shot down because of liability issues
I’m female and I’ve never had an abdominal ultrasound. Is that a pregnancy thing? I’m female and I’m utterly unfamiliar with this procedure and the fact that you have to drink a lot of water.
I only know about water intoxication because I stumbled upon an article about it in a newspaper years ago and it was so shocking to me that too much water could actually kill you that it’s stuck with me ever since.
And I will also say that based on my experience, radio companies do not routinely run their promotions through legal unless someone thinks they should. Now, I don’t work for an organization as large as Entercom, but I would assume that the primary responsibility for making sure your promotion is safe and a good idea rests with the PD and the Station Manager and then the General Manager primarily. I wonder if the PD, Station Manager and General Manager are going to get fired, too? Because ultimately responsibility lies with them.
The D.C.-area classic rock station played parts of the audio this morning. (Knew the link was in this thread, hadn’t been intending to listen, but once it was on my radio anyway…)
The deejays might not have hard-and-fast known the hazards of drinking too much water and holding it in, but they ran through all the warning lights. They joked about the kid who’d died that way a couple years earlier. They fielded the nurse’s call, and their reaction was, “Hey, anybody dying out there? Well, they signed a waiver.”
They deserve whatever the legal system throws at them.
while I am sympathetic about what happened, I would be more sympahtetic if the woman had died if the contest prize was “win a bone marrow transplant for your dying child” than “win a stupid video game console.”
And definitely whoever approved the contest should be fired, for at the very least, showing very poor judgement in not researching the possible ramifications of this sort of contest. And the frat boy disc jockeys should be fired for being frat boy disc jockeys- I mean, what kind of people actually listen to this type of “Boomer & The Noodge” crap???
I’ve been through that, too, and AY-YI-YI does it get uncomfortable! But there’s a difference between that and the station promotion: The ultrasound drinking is done in a medical setting, with (presumably) trained personnel present to deal with any adverse reactions. Also, you can void as soon as the test is done. There wasn’t anyone at the station even looking for trouble, let alone able to handle it. Assuming the woman had gone through such ultrasounds during her pregnancies, she might well have felt safe in participating since her previous experiences with overdrinking had been so harmless, not realizing the crucial differences.
That said, I believe tlsapp76* has a valid point: Why the hell are people doing such absurdly stupid things to get piddly new toys that’ll be widely available in the near future? I also recall the Cabbage Patch craze. I agree that
*Welcome to the Dope! I hope you’ll be joining as a member. I may disagree here with some of what you’re saying, but you say it well.
They are done for a lot of “miscellanous abdonimal pain.” I’ve had them done to check for ovarian cysts and for GI issues as well as pregancy. But I agree that it isn’t something “every woman would know.” I don’t remember having to drink to an uncomfortable level for any of them I did - and I’ve done three.
Because it was a stupid piddly competition that she didn’t think would hurt her. Maybe she could have waited until it was widely available but there was a chance of getting one now and all she had to do was drink some water and not pee herself. Maybe she couldn’t have afforded $250 even when it is widely available, or thought she could save herself $250 to spend on other things for herself and the kids.
Oh, I’m not singling her out for any more scorn than any other contestant–I think they’re all equally dumb. Even if there were no chance of life-threatening illness or injury, the risk of getting a bladder or kidney infection, or even of wetting your pants, is more than any damn toy is worth. Hell, the pain of holding it in is more than a toy is worth.
And maybe I’m just a cynical, overly suspicious bitch, but I figure anyone doing any sort of promotion isn’t exactly looking out for my best interest, so there’s gotta be a catch in there somewhere. You can bet your bottom dollar I’m not signing shit till I find out what the catch is.
In this case the “catch” was supposed to be “let’s watch people humiliate themselves for our amusement” which is a staple of reality based TV/radio. The catch wasn’t supposed to be risking your life for a toy.