Three Types of Fun
There’s this idea that fun comes in different types;: ‘fun’ doesn’t always mean the same thing, and it’s useful to distinguish which type of fun you’re having, or intend to have.
Type 1 fun is stuff that’s fun in the actual moment. Watersliding. Eating a bag of Cheetos. Drinks with friends. Laughing at a joke.
To celebrate Brand New Box’s 15th birthday in 2022, we took the whole company and their plus-ones on a rafting trip through Grand Canyon. It was awesome. We started by meeting up in Vegas, we did escape rooms, I encouraged everybody to go to the Meow Wolf installation, we had an evening on the Vegas strip. The next night we watched the Kansas Jayhawks win the national basketball championship. This is classic Type 1 Fun.
The next morning we got up early, caught a charter bus to the launch point, and met our river guides. The weather was beautiful. Gorgeous scenery, lovely float on our new rafts, fun chatting with fellow rafters and guides. The float trip is going to have a lot of Type 1 fun.
This particular Grand Canyon rafting trip is pretty luxurious. Five days of fun rafting, beautiful hiking, and very chill camping. The guides do everything for us, including preparing three square meals a day. Bougie. All we need to do is hang out, help unload the rafts, and sit around the fire in the evening. We brought card games and booze.
At the end of the rafting trip, we’ll hike out of the Grand Canyon - from the river all the way up to the South Rim park. It’s nothing crazy, but it’s a pretty serious hike, all uphill and after a week of camping. We will have to carry all our own stuff, water is only available at a couple of rest stations, and it’s going to be HOT. But this is a work trip - it’s not THAT strenuous. We asked everybody to do a few practice hikes. And we promised: it won’t be that bad. We encouraged everyone to just go at your own pace. Nate said he’d happily bring up the rear, at whatever pace that happened at.
The Greeks call this dramatic irony.
Type 2 Fun is fun that’s not enjoyable per se. It’s not super fun in the moment, and perhaps it’s difficult. But Type 2 fun is rewarding, even if it’s only rewarding in retrospect. Running a marathon. An all-day hike carrying a heavy backpack. Serious camping. Endurance challenges. Maybe some of our work at BNB is Type 2 Fun!
We had a few doses of Type 2 fun on the river trip. During the first night camping at the beach there was a strong wind all night long, and for about twelve hours straight it felt like were were sitting inside one of those sandblasting cabinets they use to etch glass. But the weather calmed down the next day, and we had gorgeous sunshine the rest of the trip.
The rafting trip is mostly very chill; sitting on a calm raft, enjoying the scenery. The rapids themselves are fun, and could be a little bit Type 2: if you sat in the front, you would get doused with very cold water, and more than one person (me included) barely kept their seat because the powerful waves would push you around with so much force. Camping is always a little bit of Type 2 Fun anyway: wind, weather, sleeping on the ground, no access to showers, cleaning yourself by swimming in the ice-cold river, sharing a single outdoor vault toilet. The usual.
Type 2 started to ramp up when the first people got sick.
First there was one person with an upset stomach, maybe a little diarrhea. Bummer for them, but they were good enough sports, and they muscled through. They weren’t the camping type, and they chalked it up to nerves. Then a second person started feeling it.
The guides gave us stern lectures: drink your electrolytes! Eat more food than you think you need! The rafting trip takes more out of you than you might expect.
But by day three, it was clear: people were getting sick. This wasn’t just a nervous stomach, it was communicable. Nobody was worried though, it was just a drag. Unlucky. People get sick. It’s OK; that’s Type Two Fun. The guides had brought along two covid tests (two! for a party of 28 people! in April 2022!), and one Poor Soul tested positive. I think this was a lingering false positive - this person had recently had covid a few weeks back, and wasn’t feeling too bad. But with a positive covid case, everything ground to a halt.
Poor Covid Soul had to get airlifted out, even though he felt fine by the next morning. We got stuck at the beach for half a day while the guides and national park and the state health service got all their ducks in a row, and then we rafted down to an official Evacuation Beach, and said goodbye to the Covid Sufferer. As a boss, this feels pretty bad: we brought employees on this trip, and then watched them get helicoptered away. Their partner was in tears. There’s no cell service in the canyon, so their partner had say goodbye. We’d meet him at the top, in a couple of days.
In the meantime, it was clear that this illness was spreading FAST. More and more people coming down with it, including some of our guides (who continued to make our food and pilot our rafts).
And it was also clear by now that this was not COVID. It wasn’t respiratory, but it came with a backpack full of other fun symptoms. Fever. Exhaustion. Dizziness. Vomiting. Expelling fluids from any direction. I will remind you that more than twenty people were all sharing a single vault toilet.
By this point we could visualize the graph. Our symptoms were different, but we’d just lived through two years of a coronavirus pandemic. Plus, we’re a tech company. We know what exponential growth is. We joked about the r-value. We washed our hands more vigorously. In the river.
And one-by-one, someone would simply… not show up to the next meal. One more empty space at the campfire. And in the distance, one more sound of some very intense gastrointestinal distress. This was horror movie stuff, except instead of a serial killer it’s a virus.
In the meantime, we were all just trying to drink a lot of fluids and electrolytes, and cram in the calories to help us power through the remainder of the trip. Remember: at the end of this rafting journey is an all-day hike - up from the river to the rim of the Grand Canyon.
The next morning was the hike out.
Type 3 is when you seriously think you might die.
By the last night, everybody was just trying to hang on and salvage some bit of fun. But overnight, the shoreline became a parade of people emptying themselves of whatever solids and fluids they had. It was sad, it was hilarious, and it was definitely gross. Lying under the open desert sky, watching bats chase after insects as they flit through the most beautiful starscape you’ve ever seen - and all around you the sounds of miserable people, retching.
Those that had already been sick a few days were strengthening, a few were at the lowest point, and some just hadn’t got it yet.
I got it on the final evening, and spent all night vomiting. The next morning, sleep-deprived and completely emptied of fluids and calories, it was time to start hiking.
We put on a brave face and just went for it: every man for himself, just get yourself to the top. The guides - who were all pretty sick by now too - told us this was the only way. There’s no backup plan. Just get out of the canyon. One foot in front of the other. I walked with Erika, who never got sick, and she VERY patiently walked alongside me as I hiked at a snails pace. We split into groups.
We straggled our way up the trail, spreading out. At shady points, we stopped to rest (or vomit). We heard trail gossip from the different groups. So-and-so is sick now. Someone else fainted. Someone collapsed. A ranger took a look at one guy and stopped him: there’s no way you’re hiking out. He got airlifted out on another helicopter.
We met more park rangers on the trail. They said, oh, are YOU with the river trip? THAT river trip? The one where everybody is sick? Then we started hearing it from regular hikers we met on the trail. We knew this was getting serious when even casual hikers on the canyon trail had heard about us, and kept their distance.
At one rest point, we met up with Nate’s group. He was feeling fine this morning. He laid down in some shade, and was still lying there when we left.
My little group, encouraged by Erika with infinite patience, plodded our way up. We picked up a few others and a ranger who coached us. One step at a time. In the meantime I was wondering: will any of these people still want to work with us when we get out of here? WILL we get everybody out of here?
I made it to the top.
At the top of the Grand Canyon, your cell phone works again. Service is spotty, but it’s there a bar or two of signal. It’s hard to make a phone call, but you might get a text message.
This became an evening-long coordination problem: how to find the people that have been straggling out of the canyon all evening. Who made it out? Who hasn’t yet? One couple who hadn’t gotten sick had sprinted their way up the canyon, but were now falling ill.
We only had one night booked in the Grand Canyon lodges, and they were totally booked. You couldn’t extend your stay for love nor money. But that was OK: we had a chartered van coming to pick us up in the morning and take us back to Vegas. And Vegas has hotels. And medical facilities. And our airline tickets home. When we found people, we passed along the message: just get to the bus. Help others. Get everybody on that bus in the morning. No man left behind.
We called at least one ambulance that evening. (The victim was OK, just dehydrated and feverish. Give him electrolytes and rest, the medics said.)
By late that night we still hadn’t heard from Nate. His wife had left him at the rest area, under the care of park rangers, and hiked out alone. Then we got a slack message! He was spending the night at the ranger station, and had hacked into their wifi. Go on without me, he said. Just get the team out to Vegas. Get our people home.
And so that’s what we did! I don’t think I would have felt OK leaving an employee or their partner behind. But Nate’s a resourceful guy, and I trust him to take care of himself. We got everybody else on the bus. We got to Vegas. We got on our flights home.
Nate made it out the next day. A ranger helped him hike the rest of the way. At the top he bribed somebody to drive him to Phoenix. He caught a flight home.
It turns out, our illness was just common Norovirus. We were the first of a season of infections, shutting down rafting trips that summer. Over two hundred people got sick. The CDC wrote a paper about us.
(Our group included patient zero: we’re that first bump on the left side of the graph.)
So: it turned out fine. Everybody survived, nobody quit. We definitely all learned about the Three Types of Fun.
But I don’t think any of us have been back to the canyon.