Well, I've known my Uncle for as long as I can remember, he's the man that got me interested in stuff like LEGO, Connex, mechs and other tech. He's the bloke that hired me on fresh out of apprenticeship to come and work in his garage, 15$ /hr too start, with full benefits. I've never known the man to get more then a scratch working the entire time I've known him, but not a few days ago.
One of the jack lifts gave out, freak mechanical malfunction, and nearly tore his head off. He escaped with a huge concussion, a large cut across his entire face, including broken jaw/nose, and cracked ribs. Bloke's lucky too be alive. It was certainly an eye opener for me, and scared the bejeezeus out of me too. He's in rough shape, but the Docs say he'll be 100% in a few months, give or take. In the meantime I'm running the Shop, and in charge of his three other employee's. I've already taken steps to get the jack looked at, and I'm making my charges redo their Safety Courses to make sure, even though their all older and more experienced then I am. Hell, I'm redoing mine too, so I'm not scamming anybody out.
Worst thing I can ever remember happening to me was being volted by a battery that hadn't been disconnected. I thought it was, I even double checked, but I failed to notice a single wire that had the hose cut off, so I didn't see it well in the light. Fried my hand and burnt like hell, and woke up in the hospital from shock. Took three months for my hand to heal properly, and even though I still have about 97% performance on that thing, it still twitches now and then. I consider myself lucky. But I enjoy tinkering, building and creating, I wouldn't turn this work down for anything.
Anybody else have some close-call encounter's they'd like too share?
I have nerve damage in my right thumb from a cut I got when I worked with glass. A piece got pulled across the table (as it should) and I literally threw my hand into it (reaching for the speed control) accidentally. Nasty business. I also had about 60 lbs of glass explode and fall directly onto my forearm. No real damage aside from a small chunk being torn out, but it could have been bad. Once I was knocked off of a table by a piece of glass that was about 65" x 70" or so. I was trying to save the damned window and my partner didn't have it firmly on the feet of the lift table. When I popped it, it fell off, hit the ground and knocked me off the table by smacking directly into the joint of my arm. My other friend saw what was happening and slammed the glass onto the table just in time. I could see into my arm and needed stitches, but was ok. The doc said that about another 16th of an inch would have had me in surgery. Close, but overall nothing. I almost lost my eyes when I was working on a project. I had clamped some plywood to the metal frame I was enclosing and then gone to lunch. When I got back, I wasn't paying attention and didn't notice that someone had moved the clamps. I stood right up into one and if I didn't have my safety glasses on would have lost my eye. I never wore the damn things, either. In reality, I was damned lucky to escape that place as in-tact as I am.
A kid about 23 or so needed to be life flighted out of the parking lot after he got his hand stuck in the rollers of a glass washer. They had to take the machine apart to get him out. It rolled his fingers onto the back of his hand - tearing them off and crushing them in the process. He lost all but his index and thumb. There were a few other injuries there that I saw that were no kind of fun. One guy lost his fingertips getting his fingers trapped in a belt that pulled them into the teeth of the roller. A few deep cuts that required tourniquets and surgery. One piece of glass broke and smashed a guy in the head near his eye. He was ok, though. And about a year or two after I finally left for good, a 21 year old kid died after the huge piece of glass he and his partner were carrying to the cutting table simply snapped in half. It missed all of his safety gear and hit him in the neck. All 60+ pounds of it. He died there on the floor.
Wow, sorry about your uncle man. I wish him a swift recovery from the bottom of my gnollish heart. As for myself, I've never had a work-place injury. But man, that really sucks what happened.
This is all anecdotal as told to me by my dad and grandfathers.
My Dad and both grandfathers worked at St. Louis Shipbuilders. They didn't really build ships per say. Mostly they built tugboats and barges but occasionally they built larger boats that were built for cruising the rivers.
Anyway, my grandpa on my mom's side, Grandpa Bradley, was tugboat pilot and deckhand. He told stories about guys falling over board and their bodies never being found. The current in the Mississippi is strong as hell, within a week you could float from St. Louis to New Orleans.
My grandpa on my Dad's side, Grandpa Lewis, was laborer and pipe fitter and there were all kinds of welding accidents he was witness to. Anything from clothes catching fire to tanks exploding. One particularly gruesome tale he told was of a guy he worked worth being sent to weld a hole in one of the barges. The barge had been used to ship corn. The barge was empty but corn dust was in the air when the guy lit his torch. The dust caught fire and the barge exploded. There wasn't much left of the guy when the fire was put out.
My Dad tells the story of working in tight confines of a boiler room. He couldn't climb in with his tool belt so they decided to lower it to him once he was in place. While lowing the belt, the pulley gave way. He managed to dodge his belt and the guy lowering the belt managed to slow the falling pulley enough that when it hit my Dad it only broke his nose and didn't crush his skull like it could've.
I don't really have any horror stories of my own. I've been hurt on the job but those are mostly pulled muscles and strained ligaments. Most of my serious injuries were from car accidents on the way to work.
I've been working with at-risk youth for over 8 years now. I can't turn my head all the way to the left because a girl kicked me in the side of the hard enough to permanently wrench it. Most like also have a torn rotator cuff in my right shoulder from one bad fight breakup or another. Had rib x-rays (boss made me!) last week after being slammed into my own desk while breaking up a fight.
Some jobs are a lot more dangerous than people suspect. Due to confidentiality, I can't talk about things my co-workers have suffered, but teaching Special Ed to delinquent teenagers is a lot more hazardous than it sounds! I sometimes long for the days when I did construction and roofing, at least those wounds didn't last for years.
However, the worse I've personally received was a scratch. Not just any scratch, but from a very low-functioning girl who'd refused to bathe for nearly three solid weeks. She'd totally flipped out (I think it was over someone changing the channel on the TV) and was attacking people. I jumped in and avoided the biting, kicking and attempted hair-pulling... but as I was trying to dislodge myself, she intentionally scratched my right forearm with 2 of her fingers. Trails are about 8" long, and the scars that came from the infection the next morning are still visible. I'm a loud proponent of fingernail hygiene now.
I'll exclude the "process server" side jobs I used to do because getting shot at is part of the job. Instead, I'll go with the roll up door at Target trying to remove my finger.
We had just taken a shipment of merchandise and the warehouse was overloaded. Christmas was coming and the store was stocking up. The only space to stack some boxes of china dishes was the space right between the roll up doors. Having seen the truck off the dock, I undid the latch for the door and let it drop. No sooner had I done that when the chain flapped wildly and swung for the stack of china. It was a stupid thing to do, but I instinctively grabbed for the chain. A barbed part on the link grabbed my left pinky finger and jerked up so hard that I left the floor. The flesh ripped and dropped me back down, bleeding pretty badly.
Turns out it wasn't as bad as it looked. They applied some serious bandaging and wrapped it in a splint, but no stitches were needed. the worst part of the whole event was when the doctor said in a serious tone "You'll never play piano again." My face went eight shades of pale. I play the piano as a way to blow off steam from frustration. It's a form of therapy for me! Fortunately, he was just joking, so we had a laugh as he wondered what the odds were of him saying that to a passionate pianist!
One other job I had was security work. I went out to walk the first patrol of the night (grave shift) and the lot suddenly filled with riccochets from automatic weapon fire. I wasn't two steps out the door. I just turned on my heel and walked back into the office, dropped the Detex clock on the desk and told my partner "All secure out there!" No FREAKIN' way was I going to go back out there 'til dawn's early light! (It wasn't a total waste. We played D&D all night!)
I once shut down my PC without saving my document!
My old man told me a few tale from when he was working for Avro Aerospace as a lad (line work on the infamous Avro Arrow).
They worked in a hanger out by the airport. Each day at starting time and after lunch the doors closed automatically. If you made it in before they did you were on time, if not you were late. So the doors were closing up after lunch one day. Not wanting to be late one guy sprints to try to make it. His head did, his body didn't. Complete decapitation.
Another time a guy was working up in the rafters and somehow grabbed hold of a full strength industrial power line. As my dad tells it all they found was a pile of dust and a belt-buckle.
Admittedly, mine are much less intense, but I've only been seriously working for about two years now...
First: My nose tends to bleed. A lot. I had surgery to fix a weird bone thing a long time ago, and ever since then, the left nostril was really sensitive. So, one day, at the bar I was washing dishes at, it started up. I figured, "No big deal, just stuff a napkin up there and I'll be fine!"
I wasn't. I clocked how long he blood flowed; 45 minutes. Granted, sometimes it gushed, sometimes it merely dripped, but it never stopped. By the time it did finish, I was feeling pretty woozy, and the entire garbage can was filled with one layer of bloody napkin.
The other time, I got my finger slammed between two 200-lb rocks. All it did was rip the nail out, thankfully.
A forklift almost ran me over a few weeks back, smashed my cart. That would have hurt. Aside from that, nothing that I rember particularly: acid burns, scrapes from boxes and packing straps, droped scalpel... oh, I sliced my thumb open on a meat slicer. Bleed for weeks.
Fah, TA, that's nothing compared to what my dad's done. You know those big deli meat slicers? Well, he almost lost the palm of his right hand when cleaning one. The schmuck that had used it last that night didn't set the lock right, so when he was cleaning up, the blade swung down and sliced a layer off of his hand.
Many years later, at a paper mill, he had his other hand get caught between the roller and drive belt. Ripped a lot of skin off. Ended up having grafts from his legs to replace it.
Well, if we're including parental stories, the Japanese military tried to kill my dad. He even took some bullets from it. Something about a war... ;)
What I always found hilarious was the gun camera at his tub. They had a kamikaze pilot coming in for a run and we always see the footage in documentaries and war movies as that plane comes in and hits the water just shy of the ship. He could always narrate everything that was happening as he kept his gun trained on that plane. He would emphasize how it looked like the Japanese pilot was going to succeed, but we had never seen the whole length of footage, only the few moments before the plane goes down. One day my brothers and I got to see the whole thing. It was just as he described! You could see the tracers homing in on the plane, saw the cockpit finally shatter, the pilot's flight helmet go flying off as he took a direct hit to the head, then we saw the tracers train on the bomb underneath. It took for-frikkin'-EVER! And I swear we were all holding our breaths as that damned plane got closer... closer... closer. We were all screaming "GET HIM! GET HIM!" in stark terror that the plane would hit! After all, he was coming straight at our dad! Then we realized that our very existences were proof of how it turned out...
Guess we got a little carried away!
deep down Trauma Hounds (good song), the lot of you. Very interesting tales of woe. You all make me feel better given my current tribulations, but damn, grizzly imagery abounds.
My past work hazard stories aren't so bad as I like to think I'm careful, but I have suffered fools, and to a lesser extent, still do. Let's see, uh...
-Bill Knapp's, wet dish room floor, slip + tray of glasses turns my face into a jigsaw. Mngr yells, sends me out freshly whipped, couldn't figure out why every time I'd turn around there were more red spots on table I just tidied up until elderly patrons start w/ the "Omg, look!" routine and I'm pulling glass out of my throat, too scared from the Mngr earlier to properly assess dmg.
-Mike Albert Leasing (lot tech, cars, etc). Got arced on when jerkoffs would take the cars to the wash, then (brilliantly) bring them into the garages for detailing, maintainence, etc., dripping water everywhere. Supposed to go vice versa. Water + abused to Hell ShopVac = zzark. Other lots techs I worked w/ would routinely smoke huge blunts and drive super f'ing fast in really tight areas, clipped me a few times. Very dangerous place for a kid.
-Gloving wound of a co-worker @ Frischs' (think upscale McD's). Deep fryer; reaction is to pull afflicted area away from burn...arm comes back quickly, skin doesn't. Hence, like a glove.
-Snorkling in the Bahamas; fire coral feels just like it sounds. Just grazed it and you'd swear someone just put a cigar out on your ankle. Saw a little girl later step on a sea urchin spine. 2 feet of black spike completely impaling her foot. Treatment? Pee on it (urea dissolves it).
-Loved the WWII story ShftyKtty. Here's my gramp's: on Saipan, dug in, new moon, no light, and many GI's were getting gutted from sneaky ninja-esque Japanese crawling into their holes. Can't sleep, can't smoke, can't do anything that will give you away, and you can't see = paranoia. Well, one night grandpa is in his hole when he feels his leg get cut way the Hell open, bleeding like a stuck pig. Bayonets it blindly in the dark until it stops, thinks it's a Japanese soldier (can't see). Stops the bleeding, freaked out. Morning light comes, sees it's this massive crab that crawled into his hole and took a few inches out of his thigh. Said it was like getting stabbed w/ a garden trawl 3X's.
Those stories make me glad I'm working behind a desk...
Worst accident I've been in lately was when I was doing volunteer work, making holes with big rings in a piece heavy tent-cloth. I was operating the punch machine that pushes the ring through 6 stacks of heavy canvas, she was dragging the cloth to the right place.
Then we accidentally did both at the same time. Nearly crushed her index-finger, fortunatly I wasn't applying too much force yet. Bled like hell, but no permanent damage. I did go pretty pale though... was a close call.
A great deal of these are pretty intense, who knew eh mates? 
Yeah, there's a lot of people out there doin' stuff to make our lives well, our lives, that do so at great personal risk and for little pay. Sad, but true.
Pretty intense stuff right there...
I wish I had something nasty to tell, im kinda glad I dont.
The most "extreme" injury was back at my folks house, mom was talking to the plumber and so I told her id make the steak, as I went for the (all metal, no plastic handles) pot, I had no idea mom had previously heated it enough to cook the steak in 2 mins of just contact with the metal, as she had turned the fire off a minute (literally) ago.
Its funny what your brain makes you do when it thinks all is safe. I lifted the damn thing about 20 cms before instinctively dropping it (almost on my foot).
Anyway, funny thing is weeks after that I didnt even get blisters on my hands, the skin just kinda peeled off.
My grain of sand, but you guys have had it tougher.
Be safe.
Well, most of my truly epic shenanigans aren't work related, but I do have one or two... The fact that I wasn't seriously injured in any of them was due more to my innate "resist all 5" than luck or quick reactions, lol.
My first real job was at the Sears warehouse in high school (late 80's). It wasn't exactly a safety-friendly environment. Most electronic stuff back then weighed at least twice what it would these days. We used to ride around on the forks of the forklift with 300lb. televisions and stuff all the time - the top shelves were about 20 feet high, and those guys drove the lifts pretty damn fast. Close calls were a somewhat regular occurrence. A hell of a way to get over a fear of heights pretty damn quick, I'll tell ya, lol.
One time, I happened to be sweeping one of the aisles when the guys were moving a big-ass tv onto the top shelf in the next aisle, one of those ones with the nice wooden cabinet that sat on the floor instead of on a tv table. Took two people to move it. Back then, some of the really big tv's came packed in cardboard boxes with light wooden framework inside.
When I hear "LOOK OUT!!!" I immediately jump backward, as the big-ass tv on my side of the top shelf comes crashing down about six inches in front of me and I get hit with a few splinters from the wooden frame inside the cardboard box.
I should have jumped back farther though, since everything on my side of the top shelf came down - I ended up wearing a vcr for a hat. Aside from some cuts and bruises, a good egg on my head and a hell of a headache I was okay, but the vcr was toast.
(About eight months ago, at my current job, the maintenance man was up on his manlifter changing flourescent light tubes over my head while I was sitting at my machine, with the machine in front of me, his lift behind me, a cage full of parts on either side, and nowhere to go if something happened. And the ****head s.o.b. decided to yell "LOOK OUT!!!"...
He thought it was funny how fast I flinched and curled up into a little ball with my arms up over my head to protect it. I probably should have clocked the annoying bastard like I wanted to, since he still rags me about it...)
Another time, I was moving stuff from the staging area where we offloaded the trucks to the shelves, and after I moved a tv off the forks onto the top shelf, the forklift driver and I returned to the staging area to get another one. As usual, I was riding on the forks.
Because we worked pretty fast we'd usually be halfway back to the staging area before the driver completely lowered the forks, meaning that the guy on the forks was pretty much doing a Silver Surfer impression most of the time about 15 feet off the ground while moving at something like 20 or 30mph. The guy driving the lift was known for his lead foot and serious deathwish. So he backs the lift away from the top shelf, forcing me to hop onto moving forks 20 feet off the ground, lol, and then floors it around the corner into the main aisle. He hadn't bothered to lower the forks at all, so I was perched on a 5 inch wide metal strip with one hand holding onto the lift frame, 20 feet off the ground, as this guy does his best Dale Earnhardt impression.
As we get near the staging area, the boss sees this idiot barreling down the aisle at top speed and yells his name. The moron turns his head to look...turning the wheel as well. We crashed into the corner of the last row of shelves at some serious velocity. Fortunately, I had time to grab the lift frame tightly with both hands and brace myself for the impact.
As it was, I flew off the forks and bounced once across the 10-ft-wide top shelf before plummeting over the opposite edge, 20 feet to the floor... and landing on the old couch that we had in the staging area, where we sometimes sat at breaktime. The legs on the couch gave out on impact and I rolled onto the floor. I nearly had a freaking heart attack, and I was so dizzy I couldn't stand up for almost five minutes. But, once again, I wasn't seriously injured. A twisted knee (on what was already becoming my bad leg even then), some scrapes and bruises, and a very mild concussion.
On my last job before my current one, I came pretty close to losing a major slice of fingertip. I was packing plastic bottles into boxes and placing them on one of those conveyor belt things with all the little wheels on them to slide them down to the main conveyor. They're not quite waist high and go all the way from the machines to the main conveyor in the center of the building, so there's a gate in them that you can lift up to cross through them instead of having to walk all the way around them. I noticed that one of the bolts the gate rotated on had fallen out, and decided to put it back in. I was holding the gate up with one hand and trying to push the bolt back into the hole with the other when the gate came down on my hand. My right middle finger got caught between the steel rail on the side of the conveyor and the steel rail of the gate, and they closed like a pair of scissors, slicing through the pad of my finger at about a 45 degree angle to the surface of my skin which meant that it cut pretty deep. It was almost halfway to the bone and the piece it almost sliced off was kinda flopping a bit when I moved my finger. Fortunately, it only took three stitches, and I heal fast - I was back at work the next day, where I promptly began ripping out the stitches by banging my finger into the boxes constanly, lol. I think the doc should have gone for four stitches, though - I've got a big groove in my finger where the scar is, which meant I had to relearn to play my Irish whistle correctly since the scar crosses the part of my finger that goes over the hole and lets air leak out past it...