From a friend:
One of the 'fail compilation' vids showed a clip of a young girl dancing and bumping into the a/c unit and it falls out of the wall.. I did that in a Soviet-style new-rundown hotel in Cuba, and it turned out a bit more funny than that..
This was only 2-3 years after that CIA asshole Carilla and his 'Little Havana' crew in Miami had set off bombs in hotel lobbies in Havana and machine-gunned resort beaches from speedboats from Florida trying to kill the tourist trade and killing a few European and Canadian tourists instead.. Every hotel had an army detachment discretely on the roof or set up in one corner of the garage, and there were anti-aircraft missile batteries all over the place becuase the Cuban-Americans would fly over in their private Cessna's and drop flares to set fire to buildings and crops.. The Cubans put up with that for years until they finally reacted and blew one of those bastards right out of the sky in 1996.. Then it stopped.. Only mentioning this to explain why folks were on edge when this happened..
So here's my story...
My flight out of Havana had been cancelled due to hurricane and I'd been going hotel to hotel trying to find a room for the night.. I knew that hotel - a shabby looking concrete pillar finally demolished in 2001 - was a dump back then but it was past 2am and I'd been on the road driving from the other end of the island all day.. Tired and sweaty I got into the room and turned the a/c dial to the 'on' position.., and the whole damn machine just fell away my fingertips and disappeared into the darkness silently except for a 'snap' as the plug yanked out out the wall beneath the hole and went with it.. I was on the top 10th floor.. So I stuck my head in the hole to see where it went..
It was one of the old-style models that weighs about 100lbs.. It dropped into a central courtyard with all the hotel room windows open to it.., and a bar with a dozen tables on the ground floor.. Took about 2.2 seconds until impact, and was it ever a cool impact.. Sounded like a 250lb bomb.. Bar was empty so it didn't hit anybody but it instantly and completely obliterated a table and some chairs, disintegrated empty glasses, ashtrays and flower arrangements, and made a sizeable crater when it embedded itself a foot into the floor..
There was one casualty - It scared the crap out of the white-haired late-night bartender who was sort of sleeping.. poor bastard was a retired veteran of the war in Angola and had suffered heavy PTSD.. I was told they took him away strapped down in an ambulance and he needed a month medical leave after that..
It also woke all the guests because it was 3AM.. And almost all of the guests were off tour buses full of Russian retirees, including a lot of war vets.. They must've thought it was Stalingrad or Afghanistan all over again because they all ended up running down the emergency stairs clutching their passports and wallets, trampling each other and screaming in Russian.. The porter told me the next day that some of them stood in the street in their underwear for over an hour, scared to go back in.. I didn't see or hear that post-explosion stampede because I just got another room and went to sleep.. Lucky it didn't set off a panic firing of the anti-aircraft batteries..
So ever since I check an a/c mounting before I touch the damn things.. They're dangerous!..
"With experience, no explanation is necessary,
without experience, no explanation is possible."
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My opinion is just that, my opinion.
So make no investment decisions based on my opinion.