It’s great now - if I freeze it for a few hours, it’s very useful as a spatula.
Actually, the worst that happened is I crushed some finger tendons, and my hand was in a plastic splint-thing for a few months. The rollers weren’t going terribly fast, and because I was trying to pull my hand out, my hand only went in as far as the second knuckle on my middle and ring fingers. The bitch of it was, the power switch and the power cord were on the other side of the machine, so while it was gnawing on my fingers, I had to reach around the damn thing to turn it off.
That’s weird… aren’t reach-arounds usually supposed to turn things ON?
Sorry, someone hadda say it.
As it stands, working in a college bookstore now, I’m convinced I’m eventually going to horribly injure myself on some bit of hardware we have. Paper-cutter, big boxing thingys down in the warehouse/basement, the hot air gun thing to shrink-wrap stuff…
Here’s a neat story my friend told me via the doctor that reattached his thumb (which my friend lopped off with a SkilSaw)
According to the doctor a guy came into the ER, passed out, missing 4-5 fingers across both hands. The people who brought him in were not quite sure what happened. Moments later this doctor took another guy missing 4-5 fingers across both hands. He asks what happened.
Guy two says he was outside doing yard work. He noticed his neighbour using a lawnmower on his hedge and noted how well it was working. He decided to do the same in his yard.
I guess neither guy realized you can only be so lucky to grab a few times around the lip of the mower before a blade starts lopping off fingers.
Funny you should mention SkilSaw and missing four fingers. A friend told me of another guy who watched himself run the SkilSaw across his own fingers…just wasn’t concentrating and it didn’t register what he was doing. All four fingers slid right down the aluminum roofing “like sticks of butter”. This still makes me shudder.
I was wondering if that was where your location came from!
And in “For the love of god…part duex” (pronounced deeeewwww like in Naked Gun Part Duex)
Literally just a few miles away from the wood chipper incident another man fell into a vat of chocolate. The had to call in a rescue crew and use cocoa butter to get him out.
[Tommy Smothers] I yelled “FIRE” when I fell into the vat of chocolate because no one would have come to help me if I’d have yelled “CHOCOLATE!.”[/Tommy Smothers] Lolly-do dum lolly-do-dum-day
That’s not quite how my friend recalls taking his thumb off.
He was holding a 2x4 in his left hand and the saw in the right. The saw jumped and came back down on the knuckle of the thumb closest to his palm. He said it felt like someone hit his hand with a baseball bat- but he didn’t know at first his thumb was at his feet.
He brought his hand up to look at it and his thumb was gone. He admits to “screaming like a little girl” from the shock of his missing digit.
They stitched his thumb back in place, but it didn’t take. His index toe is there now.
Yup, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Last fall a guy near here was harvesting just after dark and the feeder on the combine plugged up. He didn’t shut down the feeder drive while he unjammed it because if you shut it down you have no idea when you’ve unjammed it enough, which either means you keep running back up to check, or you unjam for way longer than necessary. Anyways, the machine grabbed his hands and tried to suck him in. Nobody realized he was missing till the next morning. All night, sitting there, a combine doing its level best to suck you through a 2" gap, and all you can do is hope that it runs out of gas. I heard that he didn’t actually lose the hands, though, much to my amazement.
Anyone else find themselves reminded of a Six Feet Under episode? One of their DBs was a worker who fell into an industrial mixer. It did bad, bad things to him.
(And ooooooofff…special sound effects or not, the sound of him being chopped up…shudder)
The uncle of someone I knew in college did this, and it did kill him. He was standing on top of the corn picker trying to unclog it with a broom handle and it pulled him in. It took a while to find him because he was completely inside the combine; they looked for him for hours before a neighbor suggested maybe they should look inside the combine.
Hmm, you would think the maunfacturer could have forseen that problem on, you know, a frickin dough roller. I hope they recalled those things after your accident.
I recall the school settled on that one, and all I got was workman’s comp. I coulda probably gotten more if I had a lawyer, but I was young and (ahem) needed the money.
Oooh, I hadn’t thought of that. My location is actually a reference to a movie which I shall not name at this time.
My Dad-a near teetotaller came home early one afternoon and poured a glass of hard liquor. He was a superintendent for PECo Energy, and had just witnessed a fellow on a line maintenance crew from Asplundh get caught by a branch and go head-first through the chipper. The last they saw of the guy was the soles of his work boots. :eek:
Sometimes I’ll take chances such as working on electricity without shutting off the power (that sort of thing).
However, when working with machines that have a high probablity of causing dismemberment, mutilation and / or grisly death, I choose to err on the side of caution. Yeah, maybe it’s taking the “sissy way” out of danger … but I still have all my parts.
Come on, I’ll bet each of us knows a friend or neighbor that hurt themselves while trying to unjam a snowblower, “fix” a lawnmower, etc.
Subway Prophet I know precisely where you got that location name. To spare you any embarassment about its cinematic source, I’ll just say doesn’t that scene start with “Honey, where’s the spatula?” Hey, the SDMB membership is a rather cultured crowd you know.
I’m going to stay far, far away from our money counter at work from now on. I feel it eyeing me… sitting on the counter…just waiting for the chance to strike…
Yup-my snowblower is older than many members of this board-has no safety devices and will readily maim the inattentive. Be careful or get used to being called stumpy.
My location is actually a reference to a movie which I shall not name at this time. 