View from the North 40: If I were in charge of world records ...

A couple in Wyoming has received confirmation from Guinness World Records that they are the fastest two-man tent assemblers on record in the entire world.

Yes, that’s a thing, and Elizabeth and Daniel Minton did it in just over a minute.

No, actually they did it in under a minute, but the Guinness rules said they couldn’t just assemble the tent, they had to put the rain fly on, as well, and they had to crawl into the tent, zip the flap shut and say “done.”

This Guinness world-record-breaking business is complicated, the couple told the Laramie Boomerang.

Elizabeth Minton has a bucket list, and she’s starting on it while she’s still young. Getting named in the book of Guinness World Records was on that list, and her husband, Daniel, got on board with the project.

The couple said they practiced a lot, filled out their application, learned all the requirements they had to meet to fulfill the record, like the part about the rain fly, etc., got an official witness, submitted all their evidence, including a video, answered all the follow-up questions and waited a year to hear the results. A whole year.

I don’t know what the record is for world record confirmation, but you’d think, surely, they could beat a year — except the organization’s website says more than 1,000 applications are submitted every week.

Crazy, right? That’s more than 52,000 applications for world records every year (in case you’re bad at math).

The categories cover just about everything, from the most tattooed senior citizen to the most baked beans eaten with chopsticks in 1 minute, the largest covered wagon and the first implanted antenna (yeah, implanted in a guy’s head and, no, I don’t know what he was thinking either — because it looks like some kind of feeler on a bug). Nevertheless, these folks and more are in the 2018 book.

Ultimately, the Mintons want to get a mention in the Guinness book, too, but there’s no guarantee.

You generally have to do something unique to get into the book, Guinness reps told Business Insider in 2013, so it remains to be seen if the Mintons — or the group of students at the U.K.’s Warwick University who built the 4,651.73-square-foot blanket fort that shattered the previous record of 3,303.44 square feet — will make the cut.

By my reckoning, I think the Mintons may have shattered another record.

At 1 minute, 7 seconds, I think they might have shattered a world record for the longest period of time a married couple has successfully cooperated while assembling a tent.

That said, though, I don’t think their actual world record, or the one I would award them, would hold up in a real-world situation.

They were allowed to assemble the tent indoors, but in real life, tent assembly doesn’t work like this.

In the real world, you’ve been trying to organize the camping trip in your spare time after work, including getting all your stuff together, buying and preparing food, and making sure you have clean clothes for the start of the next work week because you know you’re going to be tired and smelly when you get home late Sunday and the only thing you’ll want to do is take a bath and go to bed early in your real bed.

And when it comes time to put the tent together, odds are it will be windy, raining and/or dark out and you’ll be hungry, plus there will be discord because at least five of the things that have gone wrong are your spouse’s fault — that’s true for both of you.

Yeah, if you get through real-world tent assembly in under 30 minutes, I’ll give you a world record. OK, no, I don’t have the power to bestow a world record — but I’ll give you five bucks.

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Guinness lists the fastest time to erect a four-person tent was accomplished by a team of 10 people in 1 minute, 58.55 seconds, which doesn’t seem right at all. Where are the extra six people sleeping? At http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com/? I don’t think so. I was kidding about the $5, too.