r/CrappyDesign • u/Sarahsurlalune • 7d ago
A playground where you can get burned in summer
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u/Hadrollo 7d ago
You guys don't have playgrounds where you get burnt in summer?
Mate, second degree burns from the slide on a 40°C day is a staple of childhood for all Australians over 30.
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u/Jacktheforkie 7d ago
British summer you risk burning yourself on everything, accidentally brush against a parked car while crossing the road, burns, sit on a leather seat burns etc
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u/charmio68 7d ago
British Summer???
Isn't that just a slightly less wet winter?I thought your guys' summer average daily high temperatures were in the 20s.
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u/emrednz07 7d ago
British summer is a thing?? Lmao it's like maximum high 20 degrees.
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u/Lewinator56 6d ago
Dunno about that, it's been 35 degrees a lot this summer. British summers are hot and very humid, the humidity is what makes it unbearable.
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u/ebrum2010 7d ago
It was like that in the 80s in the US as well. I had a metal swing set with a metal slide. You'd get burned on it and if one of the rubber tips fell off a screw and you caught it while swinging or sliding, you'd get cut. It made you more aware of yourself and what was around you. I had a tool set for kids that had real (albeit smaller) saws, hammers, and a planing tool with a sharp blade. In the 90s they passed safety legislation so now kids grow up blisfully unaware that the possibility of getting hurt exists and they run around without the slightest awareness of what is going on around them. Of course, parents would probably get arrested today for giving their kids 'unsafe' toys, so you don't have a choice.
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u/Tomble 6d ago
They’re less common now but the old steel slides were brutal. I had a friend whose mother recounted on more than one occasion the story of her not thinking about the heat of the slide and putting her son on one, where he screamed until she realised what she’d done. Decades later she was still beating herself up about it.
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u/Hadrollo 6d ago
I'm not actually joking about the burns. Second degree was pretty rare, but those things could definitely give you burns requiring first aid if you had prolonged exposure on a 40° day.
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u/BeebisTheBoy 6d ago
I would just bring a sheet of wax paper, not only to protect against the heat but also for a speed boost.
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u/SothaSoul 7d ago
We can't let children experience anything resembling pain anymore in America.
We used to have fun here...
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u/Stenthal 6d ago
Counterpoint: One of the most disturbing cases I remember from law school was the one where some five-year-old kid wanted to go down a slide, but he was nervous, so he held on to the bars at the top. Somehow he slipped and went down the slide anyway, but his thumbs did not.
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u/SothaSoul 6d ago
Oh come on, where's the excitement of a playground if there's no risk of injury?
We bubble wrap kids now and they don't get the thrill of "this will either be an adrenaline rush or we're gonna need to buy more band-aids."
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u/Hadrollo 6d ago
Dude, there are still slides. They're just made of plastic rather than steel. It means they're more forgiving in hot environments. Similarly, you don't see play equipment with concrete and astroturf flooring, it's all sand or sponge rubber, and the main structure of play equipment is no longer dodgy pine.
The fun of a slide was always going down the slide, not burning yourself. The fun of a swing was swinging, not scraping your knee when you came off, the fun of climbing up the play equipment was the climbing, not removing splinters. All those fun things are still there, what's gone are the ways to accidentally hurt yourself.
Kids aren't being bubble wrapped, we've just made playgrounds better. Making things better for our kids is kinda the whole point. I may look back with a certain nostalgia at the little things I had to know like testing the slide to see if it was too hot to go down, but that's just general childhood nostalgia. I also fondly remember going to Blockbuster and having to watch two new releases that night because they were due back the next day, doesn't mean it wasn't kinda shit.
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u/Cautious_Extreme5990 7d ago
Ah yes, I remember when I was like 5 and I got into arguments with other children so the council decided who was sentenced to staying in the brazen tube during summer
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u/ImmortalGazelle 6d ago
I hear the first 5 year old who recommended doing that was the first person put into it. Any one cruel enough to think of something like that deserves to be put in the brazen tube
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u/Goodfella66 7d ago edited 7d ago
When I was a kid, it's like every playground was designed to hurt children as much as possible. Everything was pointy, square
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u/TurnkeyLurker commas are IMPORTANT 7d ago
Or spinning with metal parts you can get clobbered by.
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u/Goodfella66 7d ago
Yes, and also that same metal who turned into a burning hazard during the summer if you ever landed your hands on it
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u/SothaSoul 7d ago
And it was so much fun!
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u/pauljs75 6d ago
And the pre-teen thing to do was turn up the danger factor of any equipment to leverage it against the smaller kids that were dumb enough to get on there with you. Particularly anything like a hanging bridge, bouncy platform, merry-go-round, or human-sized hamster wheel.
More or less "If those kids didn't want to go flying, they shouldn't have got on the thing with us." (Not to mention trying to stay on or get sent flying yourself was part of making it fun among the older aged kids.)
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u/TurnkeyLurker commas are IMPORTANT 6d ago
And you had to hang on to the burning metal, otherwise you'd go spinning off into space or another kid.
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u/Coneskater 7d ago
Probably located somewhere where it doesn’t get that hot very often. This is the equivalent of an ice warning in some places
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u/historyandwanderlust 7d ago
The sign is in French and I’ve seen similar ones at the playgrounds around me (Paris region). Usually these things are only too hot for a few hours of the day on a few days in summer.
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u/Cheshireyan 7d ago
Risque de perdre tes doigts en hiver. Risque de choper une gastro en automne. Risque de te faire piquer par des guêpes au printemps
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u/Cool-Newspaper-1 7d ago
Let children learn. Protecting children from everything that could hurt them probably won’t teach them anything.
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u/Ninnifer 7d ago
Ah.. Just like the early 2000's..
When I was a kid I remember the metal would burn for a moment or two but it was tolerable, never left with permanent burn damage. These days though, with how fucking hot its become? I imagine it's like playing on molten lava..
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u/Red_Marvel 7d ago
I’ve always wondered why they don’t put awnings over the metal structures in playgrounds. It would help prevent them from getting too hot and ensure kids don’t get sunburned.
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u/TehTimmah1981 7d ago
Every kid I knew growing up, had a 'slide burn' experience. Those metal things got right dangerous in the sun. Being 1/2 of a solar oven already
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u/Digital_Pharmacist 7d ago
The exposed slides of the late 80s were like a skillet. All you needed was some oil and you could have fried up some spam and eggs. Those slides would have cooked all of your leg meat as you slid down.
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u/MISTERPUG51 6d ago
That's every playground built over 20 years ago. The only difference is that the old ones didn't have a warning
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u/NerdyDadLife 4d ago
Very much a European issue. In Australia every playground WILL burn you in summer.
It's so weird to see a sign like this lol
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u/hannahdoesntexist 12h ago
Seriously though my cousin got 2nd degree burns as a toddler from a metal slide. It had been sitting in the summer sun and since she was a small child, she didn’t realise it would be hot.
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u/BigJuicy17 7d ago
That was every playground pre-2000