I was watching television the other night; it was a program that was fun and entertaining and one that I’m sure many of you have also seen. The half-hour program is called “World’s Funniest Weather” and features people who are caught on video making dumb mistakes or who fall victim to some kind of indoor or outdoor calamity. The episodes bring a pretty good laugh unless, of course, you are the victim. As I watched last week early in the show, two guys were out ice fishing, and that really caught my attention. Suddenly, the one fisherman who was talking on his cell phone dropped his phone, and it slid directly into the ice fishing hole. The phone showed up on the sonar screen as it settled to the bottom of the lake.

I got a good chuckle from that episode, but a few years ago, when that same thing happened to me, I wasn’t laughing. My brother and I were ice-fishing at a nearby lake, and the action was pretty steady. I was working on landing another good-sized panfish when my flip phone went off. It was my wife, and she wanted to know how we were doing. As you ice fishermen know, you really need both hands to land a fish properly, so I told her I had to put the phone down for a minute, so just hang on. I quickly laid the phone on the lid of a nearby bucket, but it immediately slid off and made a direct path to the hole where I was fishing. I made a desperate lunge, but the phone slid into the hole and disappeared into twenty feet of water. When my wife called back minutes later on my brother’s phone, she wanted to know what the “gurgling” sound was. Of course, it wasn’t my fault; it was the ice’s fault for being so slippery. I was severely punished for the incident when my wife immediately bought me a new, highly sophisticated cell phone that I’m still learning to use.

Getting back to the “World’s Funniest Weather,” it was on that same show last week when, after the fisherman lost his phone through the ice another ice-fisherman showed up with his new electric drill-powered ice auger. An adaptor allows the six- or eight-inch auger bit to be hooked to the same electric drill in your workshop. As the ice fisherman showed off how the rig worked, he reversed the drill to bring the bit up out of the ice hole, and it detached and sank immediately to the bottom. I chuckled again, but guess what? That same thing happened to me a few years ago. I reversed my drill to bring the bit back up through the hole, but it caught on the edge of the ice hole and came undone; it sank to the bottom in nearly 20 feet of water. It wasn’t my fault; it was the ice’s fault because the bit caught the edge of the hard ice.

By the way, I have since learned how to prevent these “funniest episodes” from happening again. My wife purchased a somewhat flexible harness that attaches to my phone, and then the loop goes around my neck, so now I can’t drop my phone or lay it down hangs around my neck. I have also added another precautionary device to my ice auger. There is a somewhat flexible cable that attaches to the drill and then around the top of the ice auger so that if the auger becomes disconnected, it will remain hooked to your drill and won’t fall through the hole. These simple tethers, both for my phone and my ice auger, are definitely worth adding to your inventory. Now I’m going to go in and watch another episode of the “World’s Funniest Weather” and see what other dumb things people have done to see if I have already done the same thing.