You read a lot about great inventions or times in history where the participants were not aware or expecting the importance or future impact of what they were doing. Like Google starting out in a garage.
Have any of you Dopers participated in something you knew would go down in history (and hopefully did?)
1990- Pink Floyd Concert in Berlin when the Wall came down.
1991- Desert Storm as a member of 101st MI Airborne LRSD
1992- LA Riots as a member of the California National Guard
Three pretty exciting years, for me at least.
Me and some mates had to deliver a ring to some bloke in Mordor once. Right fucking pain in the arse it was.
Turned out that the bloke in question was quite famous, and it was all over the press for a while.
May 1993 - the first BIG gay rights march on Washington, DC.
I don’t know about “epic”, but during the 1998 wildfires in Volusia and Flagler (and other counties) I spent several sleepless days running supplies in my pickup truck to firefighters in the field, bringing firefighters back to base for rest and recuperation. At the time it seemed pretty epic to me.
That’s also when my now-wife decided she was all in love with me and stuff. She and her family were evacuated from Flagler county, I managed to find them all temporary homes with friends and family. Then I went out to help the firefighters for a few days. When I got back, dirty and tired and with the paint blistered on my pickup truck she decided I was the one.
I made the car rental reservations for the Clinton campaign in Nashville when they announced Al Gore as the running mate in 1992.
I worked for Paramount when we put out a little film called Titanic.
I saw the movie Titanic on the day that it became the best selling movie in history. So I may have been the person who bought the ticket that put it over the top.
Not a simulpost, but an eerie coincidence none-the-less.
Yeah I’d say so!
That’s more of a “brush with greatness”, but neat nonetheless.
What’d you do for the film? Accountant? Gaffer? Kate Winslet?
Not me, but my brother. He called my parents (I was home at the time) to tell them that day had turned into night. The sky was filled with ash. I had never even heard of Mount Saint Helens at the time.
When I was in school, I took guitar lessons right after this really nice Japanese guy. We always said hello. We both graduated, he got on board a plane, and the plane got shot down over Soviet territory.
I was rather closely involved with a little windstorm and some flooding in August and September 2005.
Marketing.
1994 - Million Man March
It’s minor, but a flood I helped people out in (ironically, our flood-prone house was the only one in town that -didn’t- flood, and we put up like 5 families for a short time…) ended up in a textbook on natural disasters I read in college. shrug
Nov. 1986 – worked as an intern for CNN when the Iran/Contra story broke. They were chasing the story for three weeks before it broke wide open. A very surreal experience.
Jan. 1994 – Northridge Earthquake. Really shook up a lot of people.
That’s about it. My brother was in Berlin when the wall came down, though. Lucky bastid. :mad:
I don’t know: I’m a veteran of now one of the longer conflicts this country has participated in. Though, since I didn’t think the war was justified in the beginning anyway, and I’m not exactly thrilled with calling anything GWB has started as ‘epic’, I don’t know if I would classify it as ‘epic’ myself…though others might.
witnessed the HK return to Chinese rule in 1997.