Mr. S accidentally shoved a screwdriver up his nose. With full force. At work. Made for an interesting accident report. But at least he onyl gave himself a bodacious nosebleed and not a self-lobotomy.
I stuck my hand in a blender and turned it on.
No, really, I did.
No scars, though.
Not me but my dad, who is an entomologist. He was collecting parasites from a tufted puffin. It bit the tip of his finger off.
So, um, what exactly was he doing that resulted in him shoving a screwdriver up his nose? After all, you should know the drill around here - when you make a statement like that, we need details!
I would also like to thank all the people in this thread for making me feel better. I’ve had some stupid self-inflicted injuries (sample conversation: “So how’d you do that?” “Uh, I tripped.”), but nothing on the scale described here.
Appropo of Spongess’s encounter with an evil plastic sign, I had a friend who took on his much tougher metallic cousin, the wiley, octagonal, stop sign. Apparently he was taking a piss under a stop sign on a dark country crossing and it offended him, what with its bright, reflective, red paint and its whiney and wussified, constant imperative,“Ooooh, Stop! Stop!” So, like any self-respecting, roadside pisser he gave it the what for and punched it a good one. Of course, circumstances aligned. He at 6’5’’, his punch off center and deflected, but with an excellent forward follow through, Newton’s Law of Equal and Opposite Reaction took over and the flexible sheet metal sprung back and countered with its own swipe, resulting in a 3 inch gash in my friend’s scalp revealing his britewhite, numbskull.
Moral of the story: When a sign tells you to stop… you better listen.
OK, since you asked . . .
He worked in the pre-press department of a large printing company. They had some slack time and decided to put the guys to work taking apart some old cubicles. Naturally they did not provide any sort of proper tools for the purpose.
Imagine, if you will, two cubicle walls connected by clips in the middle. These clips needed to be slid out to disassemble the walls. Naturally they were stuck quite hard, and naturally the best method Mr. S could come up with was to try prying them upward along the slot using a big-ass screwdriver. Did I mention they were really stuck? Well, eventually, they came loose . . .
Mr. S is quite creative at injuring himself:
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Was in a car that was struck by a train (slow-moving, fortunately; hit his head, lost a few minutes)
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Whacked in the head with a flying 2x4 when he was dismantling an old building on our property (nice bloody dent in his forehead)
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Set himself on fire when his sleeve got into the votive candles I had set out on the bathroom sink for my bubble bath (had to amputate the sleeves)
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Stepped in a hole as a kid while playing football and turned his foot completely around, Misery-style (still sprains it very easily)
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Fell quite heavily off the LAST STEP of the staircase, in the dark, nude, and lay on the floor for about five minutes, speechless, waiting for the overall vibrating PAIN to subside (sprained said ankle and confused the hell out of the dog)
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Whacked his thumb full-force with a hammer while driving spikes into the floor joists (impressive swelling, cursing, amazingly not broken)
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Still has gravel bits in his arm from wiping out on his motorcycle about 20 years ago
I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but I’m not gonna call him up at work just to make him recall all his embarrassing mishaps. All he has left to do is electrocute himself and fall off the roof. (I hate it when he goes up there.)
My best work-related mishap was trying to shake some film emulsion scrapings off my Xacto knife (like shaking down a thermometer; damn static cling!), losing my grip, and embedding the blade in my thigh. Fortunately the boss did not require me to drop trou to document the wound.
I broke my leg playing chess.* 
I gave myself a black eye by rolling over in bed and wacking my head on the wall. That was quite hard to explain and my parents thought my brother and I had gotten in a fight.
*C’mon, haven’t you seen Revenge of the Nerds II?
Ohh, I forgot, I stapled my finger to a piece of paper in class one day and didn’t notice till I tried to put my my paper on the stack and it wouldn’t come off.
In boot camp I injured the same guy twice in fashions that were surprising to me at the time.
- He had a pen in between his teeth, and I decided to play a little joke by yanking the pen out. Pulled a tooth loose. Apologized profusely.
But he was to get his revenge. A game of nutball ensued a few weeks later in the dorm. For those who don’t know, the main (only) goal of nutball is to score direct hits on the crotches of other (sleeping) trainees with solid objects from across the room. He got me with a damn good one,
- and before I even knew I was awake I had already grabbed the nearest object (bottle of baby lotion oil or somesuch) and did my best Randy Johnson impersonation, leaving a very impressive welt on his arm from across the day-room that didn’t heal for a while. With my left arm. I’m right-handed and my basketball teammates can attest that I’ve never shown a propensity towards accuracy or sufficient force in throwing things. I guess the adrenaline was really firing.
Oh yeah–I also got a Mach 3 injury in boot camp. I wasn’t used to non-electric razors, but being in the opening days of my first training flight I didn’t have the time to use my electric one. So I used the Mach 3 I’d packed and gave myself a three-blade mark on the top left (my left) side of the 'Stache Zone. It’s been about half a year now and you can still see it if you look closely. I can only imagine the havoc that that new 5-blade monstrosity would wreak on me.
Oo, here’s another one. I used to be a big fan of nitrous oxide, the kind-of-legal drug* that is also referred to as “laughing gas” or “hippie crack”. The way you rock it is by using a hand-held mechanical device to puncture a canister full of the gas, which then expands into the balloon you’ve wrapped around the end of the device. You then inhale from the balloon. The purpose of the balloon is basically to keep you from hurting yourself: inhaling straight from the canister puts you at risk of throat/lung/mouth damage and frostbite, because the gas comes out extremely cold and extremely hard and fast. The balloon takes the beating so you don’t have to, and the extra few seconds involved gives the gas time to warm up a little. I was extremely knowledgeable about all this, and one time I got a less-than-ideal puncture and after I was done with the balloon I noticed that the canister was still putting out nitrous, but at a very slow rate. I figured, OK, what the hell, live a little–this one time, because it’s not coming out too fast, just breathe from the canister. It was going OK for about twenty seconds and then a teensy drop of seemingly liquid nitrous jumped out onto the tip of my tongue. I couldn’t feel that spot on my tongue for about two weeks.
Sorry, another one just came up–no one was actually injured, but I almost set my lab partner on fire in Chemistry last semester when we were playing with hydrogen gas.
I also stapled the bottom side of my index finger to, well, itself. Somehow I got my finger into the Action Zone of the stapler and it decided same finger needed to be attached better, so it put a staple into said finger, lengthwise. Quite harrowing, but I mustered up my mettle and pulled the staple out and there wasn’t any bleeding or scar.
I’ve gotten pencil leads stuck in my knee, groin area, and right pinky finger. The knee and right pinky finger pencil-lead scars are still noticeable in a funky green color. I don’t think the groin-area one is.
Brilliant!
*Disclaimer: Don’t do drugs. Especially ones that are illegal in the US.
Oh, that reminds me: I have a tattooed dot on my hand from when the phone rang during a particularly intense pen-and-ink session. That one also hurt a lot.
I’m clumsy, but I don’t often end up with scars. There are a few exceptions, though. I have a weird seam-like scar on the palm of my right hand. It’s the result of being five years old, and running through the house (a trailer at the time) which had the metal vents set into the floor. I tripped, fell, and cut my hand on the nearest vent. I also have a reddish scar under my left eye, much more recent, from when Mom still had her Jeep Cherokee. She opened the door–right into my face. This scar generally looks much worse when I wake up, as I often sleep on that side.
My first TMI post!
In college, I was on the fencing team. I’m a girl, btw. During practice we wore shorts, instead of the Nasty Sweaty Knickers, though with full safety gear on the upper body (mask, jacket, gloves, all that)…
Can you see where I’m going with this?
My rather unskilled partner decided to perform a banderole. At least that’s how I think it’s spelled-- I was never the most astute of fencers-- but it’s when the attacking player basically attempts what would be a disembowlment of the opposing player… A big swipe across the gut.
Well, he missed. Bigtime. The point of his sword went RIGHT UP under the left leg of my shorts, underneath my jacket, and skewered my ladybits.
I had to spend the rest of practice with a bag of ice nestled between my legs. There was a delightful schmear of blood across the fencing strip. My coach… Once he realized what had happened, he turned white, then red, then white again. It was like fireworks. I was crying and laughing. I now have a wee scar.
Did I break the thread? Nothing came off! Not as bad as Mr Jackboots!
snerk Nothing came off me, either (though it was traumatizingly close), and I was a really good healer then. I think you and Slee win for scarring; mine went away over the course of the next decade or so.
Something tells me this thread is going to spawn an Order of the Traumatic Groin Injuries or something.
I’ve got a few, but the stupidiest was as wayward teens driving around the next county over playing mailbox baseball. I was mostly sitting on the windowledge of a large Buick with an aluminum baseball bat. I had the driver stop at a railroad crossing. I took a swing at the red lens of the warning light. The bat bounced off and hit me square in the forehead. Knocked me out cold and I fell out of the car.
Serves me right. Drugs are bad m’kay.
Once upon a time, my younger brother chopped off my left thumb at the knuckle with his brand-new-received-for-his-birthday pocket knife.
They managed to reattach my thumb though, so all was well in my world. Especially because my brother was grounded for the rest of the summer - which was an eternity at that age.
My dad also got into trouble - it was his idea to give my brother a pocket knife. Probably to keep my brother from “borrowing” and then losing my dad’s pocket knives.
I maintain the best part of the whole thing was the look on my mother’s face. She’d kicked us out of the house on the day in question with the admonishment that we were not to come back inside unless someone was bleeding.
I came back in and without turning around she told me “You’d better be bleeding”.
Then she turned around and I was spurting blood from one hand and clutching my thumb-piece in the other. That look was priceless. Priceless I tell you!
I have another one, which I remembered while looking in the mirror this morning.
No genitals involved.
I was trying to put an armload of books into the back seat of my car. I had to give a little speech in the afternoon in honor of one of my professors, and was in a bit of a hurry.
The back door of my car had a funny little curve, a “spike,” if you will, right above the window, which looked awfully neato when the door was open. Neato… And deadly.
My Milton anthology, a hulking black leather behemoth, fell onto my foot as I fumbled with my books, and hit my toe. Ouch. Frustrated, sweating in the hot midday sun, I bent over quickly to retrieve it…
And knocked myself out cold on the spiky part of the door. When I came to, I found I had lacerated my forehead. I drove home, slowwwly, stuck a big piece of gauze on the wound, and headed off to deliver my speech.
Halfway through the speech, the sniggers started. Blood had started leaking through the gauze, in the shape of my wound…
A great big “L.”
Still haven’t lived that one down.
I have got to hear the story behind this one.
Obviously, AFG, Tengu lost.
How many people here have a piece of pencil lead stuck somewhere under their skin?
Mine’s in mt right palm.
BTW, how’s that OP wound?
It’s scabbed up nicely. You can see where the corrugated edge hit me.
Yes, I have to document everything.
It still hurts a lot. Especially when I accidentally tried to exfoliate it last night.