Anybody here ever try out for a Darwin Award?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I raise the question after an attempt my friend Bob made this weekend. He’s been working in his fathers print shop for the past few weeks, helping out during the busy holiday/post holiday color advertisement rush.

Now, alot of offset printing involves processing thin steel sheets with various solvents. These sheets are pretty big, and every color in a run (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, etc.) needs it’s own sheet, so there’s a whole lot of solvent around, and although the stuff is not like gasoline it can still be pretty volatile.

So, it’s the end of the day and Bob is given the task of emptying out the “bath”, a big shallow trough full of solvent. The task involves using a little foot operated squeezie thing to pump the dirty solvent from the bath into a barrel which is then shipped off somewhere to be reclaimed. It’s a dull, smelly, tiresome job. Bob starts to thinking and remembers the last time the shop got flooded. Why, they just yanked out the handy Black and Decker wet/dry Vac and sucked the water right off the floor! What a great idea! He could just suck the bath into the wet/dry vac’s bucket and pour it straight into the barrel.

I suspect you see where this is going.

“It seemed to be working great, right? But then the Vac’s chamber, it must have started filling with solvent fumes, and then the electric motor… well, I didn’t even consider that an electric motor might make sparks, because they run on magnets, right? Anyway, that’s about when flames start shooting six feet out the top like a nitro-burning funny car.”

So Bob thinks fast, kicks the vacuums away from the bath and yanks the power cord out of the wall. He grabs a fire extinguisher and hoses the vacuume down.

“I think that’s about when it exploded…”

It didn’t really explode, but some part of the overheated motor snapped with the sound of a gunshot when it was hit with the cold of the CO[sup]2[/sup] extinguisher, almost giving Bob a heart attack.

In the end everything was okay. Bob was unharmed and learned a lesson. I fronted Bob some cash until payday for a new Vac and got to hear this story. Bob’s Dad is none the wiser (though he might soon wonder why the Shop Vac is so clean). I suppose all’s well in the end.

I’ll get into my attempt soon enough.

2

I was nearly Darwinized by my mother a few summers ago. She needed to saw down a limb that was hanging over her garden and blocking the sunlight. While she cut down the limb with her electric chainsaw, I stood underneath the thing and tried to catch it to keep it from squooshing her tomato plants.

The limb looked very heavy, and I protested several times that I wasn’t strong enough to catch it. Sure enough, the thing came crashing down, knocked me on my ass, and cut a 3-inch gouge in my forehead. After a session with the plastic surgeon, I realized that the tree limb could have easily killed me and boy, wouldn’t that have been a crappy way to go out…

3

I once caught my dad using his electric hedge trimmers with the cord stretched across and resting on the surface of the swimming pool. He seemed surprised when I pointed out that this might not be a great idea. I shudder to think how many times he’d done it before.

4

After watching my grandfather climb over the power take-off between the Massey and the corn chopper I nearly Darwinized him :eek: :mad: :frowning:

5

When I was 10, my friends and I decided to spend a Saturday morning riding our bikes over little ramps we’d built. The tail end of the course was a little jump attained by riding one’s bike over a neighbor’s driveway at an angle that allowed one to sail for a few feet over the area where the adjacent sidewalk had subsided.

My approach might have been a little off, as I had just got my first pair of glasses the night before. Anyway, when I came down, my bike’s front tire landed in that little groove between the pavement and the lawn (where the edge trimmer does its stuff) and it was a perfect fit. The front of the bike stopped dead, while the rest, including rider, continued apace. The ultimate results of all these physics in application was that I came down on the right side of the handlebar.

It ruptured my liver, bent my spine and collapsed a lung. Ultimately my spleen and appendix became involved in the story. I still, I believe, am runner-up for the longest stay in intensive care at Texas Childrens’ Hospital. Manny months before I was streetside again.

Don’t worry, I haven’t procreated. Yet.

6

This is self-indulgent. Reading over my post was a shaker; I haven’t even thought about that in years. That was October 26th, 1963.

7

A coworker’s father brought a shotgun over to his house. The shotgun was very old and hadn’t been fired in decades. There was a shell stuck in the barrel (I don’t know if had been in there all that time or had been inserted by the father). They disassembled the gun and tried various means of removing the shell without success. Eventually the son had a brainstorm - he’d drill through the shell. So clamping the barrel in a vice, he applied a power drill to the shell …
… the resulting detonation of the shell drove the drill back into his chest, fortunately butt first. Naturally, the slug from the shell fired out the front of the barrel but went into a wall without hitting anyone. And if nothing else was accomplished, the force of the detonation dislodged the shell which came out of the barrel.

8

In college, I worked part-time at a furniture store. Some of the furniture was delivered to us in boxes that were a combination of heavy cardboard, particle board, and wood slats. We would unpack it, and throw the boxes into the big dumpster outside.

One day, after unpacking many pieces of furniture, the dumpster was almost full, and we needed more room to throw away more packing material. “Ah Ha!” I thought, “Here is my chance to get in good with the boss!”

While everyone else went on break, I decided to see what I could do to compact the trash in the dumpster (I am uniquely qualified to do this, at 6 feet 4 inches, and 320 pounds)… I decided to get in the dumpster, and jump on it to compact the refuse…

I clambored to the top of the dumpster, took careful aim, and lept as high as I could…

As soon as I touched the top of the boxes, the whole structure collapsed… leaving me pinned, upside down, against the inside end of the dumpster!

I wriggled for several seconds, but every time I moved I slid several inches farther down into the dumpster, and the wood slats poking into my body were wedged further into it (most painful!!!). It occured to me, suddenly, that no help was likely to come for quite a while (remember, everyone was on a break)… and I could not breathe!

On the virge of passing out due to lack of air, I decide to risk it all (fuck it! I’m gonna die upside down in a dumpster!! Imagine the headlines in the local paper!) I gave a gold-medal struggle, which resulted in my head finally coming into contact with the bottom of the dumpster, giving me the leverage to free myself, slowly, from the wood slats and cardboard, and right myself…

No one from the rest of the crew knows how close I came to death that day…