Editing 2590: I Shouldn't Complain

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==Explanation==
 
==Explanation==
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[[Megan]] has had a very unfortunate experience of falling into a garbage can and being repeatedly stung by wasps. [[Cueball]] expresses an appropriate amount of horror about it. However, Megan seeks to downplay this experience by saying "I shouldn't complain" and that she's "lucky" it wasn't worse. This has become a {{tvtropes|AppealToWorseProblems|habit in Western culture}}, like comparing minor issues to "kids starving in Africa" or war-torn countries, notably Ukraine (this comic was published during the {{w|2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine|Russian invasion of Ukraine}} starting in February 2022 and was ongoing when this comic came out on March 7).
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{{incomplete|Created by a BEE PROVING THE HAIRY BALL THEOREM (WITH A COX-ZUCKER MACHINE) - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
  
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Humans have a tendency to re-calibrate their mental scales to place their actual experience in the center. Cueball, who has never experienced being trapped for hours with stinging insects, rates this in comparison to not being trapped at all. Megan, however, rates it in comparison to other uncomfortable places a person could be stuck.
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Megan has had a very unfortunate experience of falling into a garbage can and being repeatedly stung by wasps. Cueball expresses an approriate amount of horror about it. However, Megan seeks to downplay this experience by saying "I shouldn't complain" and that she's "lucky" it wasn't worse. This has become a {{tvtropes|AppealToWorseProblems|habit in Western culture}}, like comparing minor issues to "kids starving in Africa" or war-torn countries.
  
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The title text explains how Megan came into such a mess. A tennis ball used in a clothes dryer got stuck in the exhaust vent, and was shot out of the house through the exhaust vents hole in the wall. Then it hit the wasp nest and ricocheted over on Megan knocking her off the ladder she was standing on. Since she was close to the nest, she may actually have been up on the ladder in order to see if she could remove the nest. The fall from the ladder made her end up in the trash can where she could not get out. The angry wasps began stinging her legs. This continued for two hours.
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Humans have a tendency to recalibrate their mental scales to place their actual experience in the center. Cueball, who has never experienced being trapped for hours with stinging insects, rates this in comparison to not being trapped at all. Megan, however, rates it in comparison to other uncomfortable places a person could be stuck.
  
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In the title text, Megan continues to downplay her experience even though it was very painful. She says that the wasp nest was of the type {{w|Dolichovespula maculata|bald-faced hornets}}.  
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In the title text, Megan continues to downplay her experience even though it was very painful. The {{w|Schmidt sting pain index}} is a pain scale for different insect stings, which ranges from 1 to 4. Megan says her stings were a 2 on the scale, which compared to a pain of 4 is "less painful", but still worse than not being stung at all!
  
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The {{w|Schmidt sting pain index}} is a scale developed by entomologist {{w|Justin O. Schmidt}} to rank the relative pain caused by different stinging insects. This scale ranges from 0 (for stings that are completely ineffective) to 4, which denotes torturous and nearly incapacitating pain (originally, Schmidt only classed one species as a 4, but two additional species have since been added at this level). Megan says her stings were a {{w|Schmidt_sting_pain_index#Pain_Level_2|2 on the scale}}, which denotes "familiar" pain, comparable to that of the common {{w|Western Honey Bee}}. Most people would find that experience incredibly painful, particularly since she endured multiple stings over a long period of time, but Megan points out that there exist insects with more painful stings.  
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She further downplays by focusing attention on the sting pain index instead of the sting lethal capacity, described by the [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3810666/ author of the pain index]. The two are not necessarily equivalent. Assuming all insects in the colony affected stung Megan at least once over her two hour ordeal, potentially delivering enough venom to kill 84 kg (185 pounds) worth of mice (or human?), the scenario shown (Megan standing in routine conversation, casually discussing the incident soon after the fact) is implausible. She is far more likely to be in hospital, and in a [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32252275/ gruesome fight for her life].
  
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Megan concludes that she'd been lucky, based on the argument that she theoretically could have endured something worse than she did. The joke, of course, is that by almost any subjective standard, her experience was deeply unlucky.
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Victims of severe abuse often have learned habits to downplay the most severe suffering, which could be a reminder for visitors or readers with exposure to such things. It's possible Randall is engaging personal experience in such an area, making a joke about how difficult it is to process somebody behaving that way.
  
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She also further downplays the situation by focusing attention on the sting pain index instead of the sting lethal capacity, described by the [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3810666/ author of the pain index]. The two are not necessarily equivalent. Let's assume that all insects in the colony affected stung Megan at least once over her two hour ordeal. A colony capable of sustaining an attack over two hours would probably be at least as large as the typical [https://www.rescue.com/latest-buzz/outdoor-pests/bald-faced-bully/#:~:text=Bald%2Dfaced%20hornet%20nests%20often,hornet%20workers%20enter%20and%20exit. maximum size for a bald-faced hornet nest]. Such an attack might (depending on number of attackers and the species of wasp) deliver enough venom to kill 84 kg (185 pounds) worth of mice (or human?). Given such an attack, Megan would probably not be standing around in routine conversation, casually discussing the incident. She would far more likely be in a hospital bed, and in a [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32252275/ gruesome fight for her life].
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The title text suggests a quite improbable single {{tvtropes|NoodleIncident|initiating event}} caused both the entrapment and the insect attack. Whether the tennis ball was lodged in the dryer vent deliberately (or by some form of incompetence/error) might indicate if there actually was a reason to complain about some other person who singularly caused the predicament. Too say nothing about the fact that dryer vents are usually shuttered, nor have enough pressure behind them to ''launch'' a tennis ball.
  
 
==Transcript==
 
==Transcript==

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