Things are definitely heating up as we reach the grand finale of The Great Australian Trade-Off, Season 2… which I guess is why they decided to grind things to a halt with a one-off Christmas special. All the big shows get Christmas specials, so I guess it’s a sign of health. That’s something to breathe a sigh of relief about.
Anyway, they brought back the most popular contestants from last year, stuck them all in Santa hats and had them do Christmas-themed challenges. It was all very heartwarming, especially since they weren’t competing against each other. They even brought back some old favourite challenges, including the one where they were given a medical device known as a hyperbaric chamber and had to identify the fault in it.
Obviously we’re dealing with medical equipment here, so there are amazingly stringent regulations, and if you miss out on one of them then your oxygen chamber is just a humongous paperweight – and one that’s not even usable as a paperweight, at that. You’d have to bend down to put the papers underneath, and then bend down to pick them up, and seriously, paperweights. What even IS a paperweight. I’ve had papers on my desk for years, and they’ve always just sat there, unimpeded. If people desperately need paperweights, they need to close their office windows. But I guess they like to keep the place oxygenated.
Anyway, Ryan was struggling with some of the finer points of the device until he figured out that he could simply re-route the internal system by integrating the loop, or something to that effect. Boom: one of the most functional portable oxygen chambers Melbourne has ever seen. Of course, we all knew Ryan was going to win because it’s a popularity contest at the end of the day, and it was the fuzziest ending for a Christmas special. But still, felt good to see him win it outright.
-Lou