Just today, I was doing a service call for a wireless internet customer. I had just replaced a small tripod with a taller one, and was coming off the roof. I was just transfering my weight off my left foot (on the roof) to my right (on the ladder), when the bottom of the ladder suddenly slid out from under me. Now, the ladder was sitting on the customer’s deck, so the edge of the roof was about 8 feet up.
Anyways, ladder went straight down, as did I. I landed on my feet and ass, apparently having missed the ladder, which could’ve twisted an ankle easily. Then I remembered the tripod would be coming down after me, so I covered, hoping I didn’t become skewered, but it landed past me.
I just stood up, not a scratch, and not sore in the least.
So, has anything happened to you, for which you should be in a world of hurt, but you walked away as if nothing happened?
I was working in Taiwan, installing some antennas. We were attaching the ground wires using exothermic welding. We had a graphite mold that would clamp around the wires, then you would pour a quantity of an aluminum/copper powder mixture into a cavity in the mold. There was a flint striker gun that would ignite the mixture, which would burn furiously (at 1400 C) for a few seconds, creating the weld.
Once, I set up the mold and clicked the spark gun, and a jet of flame shot out of the mold and onto the back of my hand. My whole hand was a weird black/silver color. It did not hurt at all, which I took as a very bad sign.
After a few confused seconds, I wiped my hand on my t-shirt, and all the black came right off. I had no damage at all.
This didn’t occur to me until now, but a couple of years ago I was packing up to move, and it came time to gather up my dad’s weights. I didn’t want to take a dozen trips, so I didn’t bother to unload the bar. I carried about 90 pounds total (I weigh ~120-130) in my right hand, braced against my right shoulder, out of that room, across the basement, up the stairs, through the kitchen, through the living room, down the front steps, to the car, and dumped it in the back. No tiredness then, or soreness the day after. In retrospect I’m surprised I didn’t pull anything.
I was 19 and my buddy driving the car was a couple of years older. Saturday night, or more properly Sunday morning, about 4:00 AM. Both of us dead drunk and tired from a night of hopping country honky-tonks.
I looked at the car’s speedometer and it was locked over on 115 mph. “In a hurry?” I ask. “Time to go home” says he. We topped a hill and somebody was stopped in our lane. A newspaper delivery guy was coming from the other direction. Somehow, my buddy squeezed us between them with only a major hit to our car’s back quarterpanel.
When the state police got there, they measured our skidmarks at 186 feet after impact. That car spun 186 feet straight down a two-lane road. It didn’t flip and it didn’t go off the road and smash into the forest’s tree-trunks that lined both sides. I had a minor bump on my knee and my buddy a scratch on his forehead. Nobody else was hurt. We all should have been dead.
Working on the gate of a freight elevator, put my hand where I should not have. Droped the dead weigh full speed on my middle finger. I pulled my hand out from under wondering what I would find when I opened my hand. I prayed first and then opened my hand. I wiped the grease off expecting to see blood and mush. finger nail looked funny and ended dropping off, but no pain.
When I was 6, my stepdad rolled his Chevy Bronco with all of us in it. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. The vehicle went off a low bridge, rolled over two or three times, and then came to a rest on its top in the middle of a creek.
My total injuries: Some scratches on my ankle, and a nasty but small gash on my left knee.
More impressive: My 2-year-old baby sister had been riding on Mom’s lap in the front seat. She was completely unscathed. Mom had whiplash and lost her glasses, but recovered fine after a week of a neck brace.
When I was about 8 or 9, I let my friends stage a “hanging”. Guess who was the criminal? I had minor rope burns and a sore butt because I got a MAJOR spanking when my mother found out what we did, but otherwise, I survived.
A few times while drilling through thin material the bit would punch through and somehow miraculously end up between 2 of my fingers or barely miss my hand or finger…
Also, a few times where I was driving the tractor (this is while I was living on a ranch) I’d speed through the pastures at night feeding cows, only relying on my nightvision or moonlight. The next day I’d realize there were bull holes that I missed somehow–usually one’s that’d be pretty devastating should I have met them.
At a restaurant I used to manage, we had a large aquarium with a pair of nurse sharks - they were each about three feet long. The tank was in my office, situated in front of a window to the dining room.
We used to feed the sharks by hand - as in, hold on to their food (sliced up squid steaks) until they took it. I can’t remember if it’s because they don’t see well or smell well, or both, but if we just tossed the meat into the tank it would sink to the bottom and the sharks had a hard time finding it.
One day while I was feeding them, someone came in the office and started talking to me. I guess I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing, and had a couple of fingers dangling in the water as I conversed with this person. Suddenly I felt something brush my fingers and heard the loud popping noise nurse sharks make when they suck in their food - and jerked my hand out of the tank so hard and fast I almost fell off the ladder. I’m incredibly lucky I’m not missing a large chunk of flesh.
I was hiking and it started to rain a light drizzle. The soil had clay. I was near the park road where it cuts through the hill with woods so there is an incline with exposed wet clay. The cut hill at that point was at about a 60 degree incline and I was about 10 feet up it trying to reach the road. I started to slide straight down to the road at a fast speed with one foot in front of the other while missing all the 3 to 6 inch trees. I slide to the bottom at about the speed a person could run and didn’t wipe out even at the bottom when it transitioned to an asphalt road. There was a 3 inch groove in the hillside where my heels had gouged out the soil. Mud sliding is exciting, but not something to try more than once with trees all around and asphalt at the bottom.
My last vacation which my brothers and I call the vacation from hell was one natural disaster after another in northern Wisconsin. I won’t go into details. It was back in 1998 I think. Tornadoes floods and super cold weather happened for a week and some people were still missing when we went home days after they disappeared during one of the storms. The line of storms they disappeared in were the same ones that had us in the middle of a tornadoes and trees dropping around us while on our ATV’s After the storm we had to cross an old growth forest area that had been logged and some trees left. The only trail through the logging debris had old growth pines dropped on it every 100 feet ripped up by the roots. The effective blockage of the trunk was higher than we stood and the trunks were 3 feet or more in diameter. This being the vaction from hell just before the storm hit Mother’s ATV transmission started to fail. We had to tow it most of the way back on what had been a two hour trip before the storm. It was hard enough to get the working ATV’s through the logging debris. The one we were towing was almost impossible. It took us one hour to get through the old growth tree area after the storm when it took 5 minutes with us driving through leisurely the first time. The whole week was like this. The only people that ever believe the story of this whole 9 day vacation are my brothers and I who spent the whole week in northern Wisconsin. Ma and and the other women went home soon after this last described event. We did attend the forth of July fireworks that night in town during tornado and severe storm warnings. This event is in this thread because it was amazing that we didn’t get a tree dropped on us, or hit by lightening as there was lots of it.
Somebody was pulling a homemade welded together barbecue grill and eating counter with seating down the main trail which was an old railroad bed. The cook was in the middle and bench seats were all the way around the table which was around him. It was like seeing somebody pulling a section of seating for a baseball diamond. The thing was about the size of a farm wagon. How do you describe a vacation full of stuff like this and be believed.
Spun out on some ice on a highway in Idaho about 20 years ago. Did a 360 slide then rolled my truck off the road into a ditch. Caved in the cab and destroyed the camper shell, but I didn’t have a scratch. The truck was an old one (1970 Ford) that didn’t have seat belts when I got it. I had just installed some two days before the accident.
It depends on how you define hurt, I guess. I had just gotten one of those fancy microwaves with the heating element on the top that makes your food all crispy. When I was getting my chicken nuggets out, I brushed the coil with my pinky. My hand jerked back with that automatic ERROR reflex. My flesh there was completely ash-white. I freaked, and waited for the pain to kick in. It never did. I’ve got an ugly little scar now, but it never did hurt, even as it healed.
I once ate a pound box of chocolates washed down with an entire liter bottle of red wine. While I had the hangover from hell, I’m grateful I didn’t die.
Back in college I was doing 75-ish on the freeway in the inside lane when I ran into a 4" tall 3’ wide piece of steel in the lane. Which yanked the handlebars out of my hands & threw me off. The bike & I slid to a stop going neck & neck. I think I passed it or it passed me 4 times. Never got tangled in it.
When I stopped sliding I instantly got into a crawling position & scrambled the 5-ish feet into the shoulder & rolled over just in time to watch a Chevy slide sideways through where I’d just been. He’d been following me & locked 'em up trying to stay behind me.
Injuries: a shallow scrape the size of a quarter on the heel of my right hand. I’d had worse skinned knees as a child.
My helmet wasn’t even dinged; it never touched the pavement. My leather jacket was scuffed, but the nylon backpack/bookbag I was wearing took almost all the damage. My boots had worn through on the outside of my ankles where that big hump in the leg bone is. The socks underneath were just starting to get scuffed when I stopped.
Neither the paramedics nor the cops could believe it.
I was running up the stairs carrying a broom. I tripped. My only injury was a wicked bruise on my shin. I could have impaled myself on the broom and done some serious damage–I could have put out an eye, stabbed myself in the neck, etc. I don’t know why sweeping out my closet was so all-fired important that I had to run up the stairs with a broom, anyway.
I set myself on fire, very briefly, in chemistry class. We were using burettes to measure out some liquid that we intended to add to the flask on a bunsen burner, but ours didn’t have a tight seal, and the bottom fell out. It only took a few seconds to put it back together, but some of the chemical splashed on my hands, wrists and one forearm. I didn’t realize that it had gotten anywhere other than my hands, and it dried pretty much instantly, so my hands were all I washed. A few minutes later, as I was pouring stuff into the flask, a lick of fire raced up my wrist and forearm. It was gone in a second or two.
While I was still trying to figure out if it still happened, a lot of fuss was made by my lab partner and the two girls on the other side of the lab bench. We were all a bit surprised that it didn’t hurt me at all, but it had been an impressive visual effect.
Farm accident. My legs were caught between a large piece of equipment and its carriage. Had there been even an inch between the upper mass and my legs, they would probably have both been shattered. As it was, my legs and the equipment hit the carriage as a single unit, and the force was transmitted straight through. 2" angle iron, bent six inches out of the way by my legs.
I still have a visible notch on the back of my thigh, some 30 years later.
Less impressive than some above, but I was riding my bicycle fairly fast beside a row of stationary cars (at a traffic light) when a passenger decides to open his door and get out. I hit the brakes and swerve, hitting the pavement (sidewalk) which flips the bike up and me over the handlebars. Some instinct makes me duck my head, and I hit the ground in a perfect judo roll, coming up on my feet without a scratch.
First time was when I was playing Capture the Flag with a group of friends at night in a park that I’d never been to before, thus, I didn’t know the layout, although I did know a really deep and large canal ran through it.
So for some reason or other (which I can’t remember now) I was running at full speed through this park, in the dark, and I suddenly remember this canal ravine is rapidly approaching somewhere ahead of me. I stopped right before the edge of it and the speed momentum made me lean forward to the point where I almost went over. I was right on that area between where your balance is pulled half and half and you feel your body tottering there in mid balance, and I made myself fall backwards onto my ass as fast as I could. Truth be told, it wasn’t that hard since the scare I had of how close I came to barreling out into that open space made my legs give out…so that helped the backwards fall.
The second time was, of all places, in school, at night, right before a choir concert. Yeah, I was in choir and the stands that we stood on were raised further by being on five foot high tables themselves.
Anyway, we were rehearsing and the stage lights were currently off (for about 10 seconds) to signify a song change. It was during this time I remembered I had to give the solo artist his notebook (which I was hanging onto), so I (being on the top row of the stands) bound down the other two stands and, as my feet left the bottom one, remembered the stands were on five foot high tables.
Too late… I knew the drop off was coming and that I was about to make a huge mistep and possibly break something, but I was going too fast to be able to stop so I just jumped blindly. Keep in mind this is in total darkness. : p
I landed on the ground, off the stands and tables and fell to my knees over a microphone. The lights then came back up with me there looking like I’m straddling it…so thankfully it was just me embarrassed in that position rather than in the hospital with an injury. I’ll take that. : p
Methinks I probably shouldn’t be running around anymore when it’s dark and I can’t see. I seem to have bad luck in those situations…