SAN DIEGO, CA - While sailing off the La Jolla coast Friday, a man tragically drowned after falling off a boat and being lost at sea. He could have been saved, but the other passengers who witnessed him topple over the railing spent too long debating what to yell to inform the captain that he had fallen.
"Human overboard? Person overboard? Generic sentient entity overboard?" one man mused as he sipped a strawberry daiquiri. "I don't want to be offensive here. We've got to be careful."
The woman sitting near him agreed. "We could just, like, do jazz hands or something and hope the captain notices?" They tried that for a while but it didn't work. "Hmmm."
For the next hour, as the boat sailed farther and farther away from the drowning man, the two brainstormed a comprehensive list of everything they could say that wouldn't offend anyone.
They came up with lots of ideas:
- Non-gender-conforming person overboard
- Another member of the patriarchy is perishing don't save him
- Someone is dying but we're not sure what xis pronouns are
- The sea is angry today, my diverse friends
- ARRRRR shiver me timbers thar be a drownin' thing in that thar water
- IT'S MA'AM OVERBOARD
- Thar xe blows
- Vaguely human-shaped object overboard
The passengers eventually settled on "something happened to some person" but it was too late.