Quote Originally Posted by MattCB View Post
Reminds me of a variation of an often heard question back in the Navy...

Nub: Why do we have such idiotic rules about (insert topic).

Chief: Because someone, somewhere, did exactly what it tells you not to do.


The on going joke was that NOTHING was sailor proof.
That reminds me of a pair of bridges in Iowa City. They form a "V" across the river. Each bridge is for one direction of traffic and they can be seen HERE. The bridges on the side of the river with the bars are merged together, but as a drunk college student staggers across that bridge, he (of course it is always "he") notices through his blurry gaze that the gap between the bridges gets increasingly wider as he heads closer to his dorm. Now the obvious thing to do upon noticing this gap is to declare, "Hey, I can jump across that! Hold my beer!" Conveniently, there is a small dam immediately downstream of the bridges (it is visible in the link) and so when the honor student fails to make jump, his body rolls around under the dam for several hours until divers can retrieve it.

There was a public uproar about it in the 90s after yet another students body was recovered and the city engineer said the perfect, though politically incorrect thing. "We can put up signs, we can put up fences, but we cannot engineer away stupid."