WARNING: This article contains disturbing content that may offend sensitive readers, including descriptions of ridiculous behaviour and some advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal arts majors). Reader discretion is advised.
CALGARY, Alberta – A source inside City Hall has revealed several memos detailing the truth behind the city-wide shutdown of playgrounds, structures, facilities, and the associated parks and amenities.
A playground closed down by the City of Calgary. Terribly tough times for kids.
While the theme of the shutdowns was of course the Covid-19 pandemic, the leaked memos outline that the shutdown has been in the works since early 2019, after several years of dealing with a serious problem Calgary has been facing alone: The APEGA Challenge.
The APEGA Challenge sounds mild and even dorky on the surface, but delve deeper and its nature overwhelms all sensibility. The Challenge dares APEGA professional members and members-in-training to consume absurdly inordinate volumes of alcohol, and then take selfies of themselves on playground equipment acting like imbeciles.
Of course, the first of the videos posted were innocent enough. Some engineers or geologists who had consumed some alcohol, swinging in a playground after dark, or sliding down a kiddie slide holding a vodka soda. But eventually the younger members pushed the envelope and the scenes became something out of a Kid Rock video in Ft. Lauderdale.
A grainy still shot from one of the APEGA Challenge videos found on NerdTube. These two professional geologists were caught on tape at a playground in Fish Creek Provincial Park.
In one video, 2 teams of engineers were seen pouring shots of Fireball down a slide into the mouths of several other participants while attempting to apply Cauchy’s Residue Theorem to contour real integrals of the slide’s profile in the complex plane. Another video depicts 5 geologists creating a “waterfall” down a plastic rock climbing wall after too many pints of Moosepeace beer. Many of the more disturbing videos took place during daylight hours, sometimes even in front of playground attendees and their parents.
A professional engineer registered with APEGA
“That APEGA video thing? I did that! Man you should have seen it! We chugged like 3 bottles of that CO-OP Rye, you know – the stuf that comes in a plastic bag, then stripped down and headed for the monkey bars at the playground over on 10th. Dude, you should have seen Tom hanging his dangly bits upside-down making monkey noises butt naked! It was epic until those teachers came out!” – Anonymous P.Eng.
The memos leaked from City Hall outline the need for extra staff to clean up and sanitize all the sites after videos have been shot, as well as the cost of incarcerating and charging all of the so-called professionals with Lewd Behaviour and Public Disturbance charges. City Council had come to the conclusion that the simplest way to flatten the curve of “The Challenge” was to close playgrounds until the fad had passed. When Covid-19 took hold of the world, it gave them the perfect excuse without having to irritate the all-powerful APEGA.
APEGA was asked to comment and they did. “We do not condone this behaviour from any of our members, even if they are just in training; they should know better. But we empathize with them because the vast majority of our members are currently unemployed and they are just finding creative ways to pass time,” the Vice Chair of APEGA’s Calgary Chapter, Martha Munthly-Rodpolisher, told 2P News’ Yu Mii.
2P News was unable to find any remaining APEGA Challenge videos on the internet, as most were scrubbed as part of an internal cleansing of members breaching the Code of Ethics. If you have any videos or sources of where they can be found, please contact 2P News staff so we can enjoy them as much as think we will.
