I sort of understand
I haven't been in a situation quite like this before, but my reaction to being in very serious trouble has always been to start sniggering and laughing. This got me in a lot of trouble at school. I never did anything seriously bad, but if I got a bollocking, I just couldn't help laughing. This invariably made the situation worse and lead to me being in even more trouble. I nearly got expelled after this laughter thing escalated a minor 'not handing in homework' situation, to being in very serious trouble for laughing at every single person who tried to give me a bollocking, right up to the headmaster.

I still get it at work. I was working on a system at work, and day 3 of our implementation was an absolute disaster, and things started to go seriously wrong. Not with the system, but the users just seemed to lose the plot half way through day and reduced their productivity down to 1 widget an hour per person rather than the usual 30-60 an hour. Once the crisis was over and I got dragged into the big bosses office for a debrief, I collapsed in the chair and just started laughing!! I explained it was through relief, and he was a good guy and understood this, but it was still a seriously inappropriate reaction to the situation!
( more balanced than jeremy beadle It wasn't me..., Mon 26 Jul 2010, 17:14, 1 reply)

The second one
I do laugh when things go wrong. It's that sort of dry grim humour in a situation where it's not like someone has died, just a computer system is down and causing minor inconvenience and everyone else is acting like the world is on fire. I can work more efficiently by laughing at it and getting on with fixing it than being all grim and serious and putting all that energy into tutting frowning and apologising.

Don't know about the tragic death of a child though, I think that'd haunt me forever if I'd heard and seen it etc. Still, not one to judge.... I assume (hope) it's just this particular person's brain's way of dealing with the feelings buried further down. It's preferable to the whole psychopath thing.
(Cloudane, Mon 26 Jul 2010, 20:36, closed)