It usually takes not one, but a series of mistakes to get yourself in serious trouble.
One of our barn walls is pushed out a little bit to far from the cinder blocks it rest on. This is the result of stacking to much hay against it.
I bought a chain rated for 850 pounds and wrapped it around a beem. I braced my pickup truck, attached a comealong to it, and atached the chain to the comealong.
I’ll just pull the wall back into place. Simple.
Of course I was probably well over the 850 pound limit, but hey , they always make these chains stronger than they say, don’t they?
The chain snapped and came flying towards me. I narrowly avoided decapitation, as the wicked dent in the side of my truck attests to the force of the chain’s reflex manuever.
I cleaned up after stupidity and went up to the house.
Mrs. Scylla pointed out that my leg was bleeding.
Embedded in the meat to the right of my left shin was a piece of the link from the broken chain. It was in there about half an inch. Didn’t hurt at all.
Well, I’ll just pull this out.
Then it really started to bleed, and I mean it started to bleed in a way that made me wonder just how much blood I had to spare.
On the way to the hospital pressing a paper towel against m shin as hard as I could, with my daughter screaming in the back, and my wife screaming in the front that I was ruining the upholstery in her Durango, and later at the hospital while I was geting my tetanus shot, I was able to relfect on the follies of exceeding breaking strain, and the reason why there are such things as load limits. I also learned that is generally a bad idea to yank foreign objects out of your body once they’ve become embedded there.
Now that I think of it, the wall could have fallen on me, or the roof collapsed. I could have been hit with the chain and killed. The truck could have slid and crushed me. I had no business attempting a dangerous and professional job as an underequipped and ignorant amateur.
In summation, I am one lucky dumb motherfucker.