Ow.

I've done the chuck key thing on several occasions. Also done the wander
off and come back to tortured screaming to find the tool now attempting
to face off the chuck.

Apprentice entertainment was to get a roller bearing (about 4-5" dia)
spinning using air then drop it on the floor. First one on the bench was
a wuss, last one out the pit had smashed ankles.

I wonder why I "resigned with a reference".

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, sweller

Blerk I knew did that one day for a laugh (with a smaller bearing) and
got it spinning to the point where the outer cage let go. He survived,
the fate of his underpants is unrecorded.

 

May I just say OUCH - I presume he kept the hand but scarred?

 

So did mine (they made injection moulded plastic wot nots too).

[Snip gruesome tale of molten glass]

My dad told me that one day one of the blokes operating an injection
moulding machine thingy overrode the safety device so that he could speed up
his work and managed to press the go button with his hand still in between
the two halves of the mould. Apparently those moulds come together with
several tonnes of pressure, so no more hand!

I've seen a chap wearing ordinary shoes have his foot run over by a forklift
truck. No loss of limb but he wasn't very comfortable for a few weeks
afterwards.

A bloke I worked with managed somehow to get his tie caught in the shredder,
which even he saw the funny side of once he'd got some oxygen back into his
system.

One time at work we lost all power to the main computer room, which was odd
because it was on its own independent supply... off I toddled downstairs to
the cupboard where the leccy pipes came into the building only to find one
of the maintenance men flat on his back making "nnrrrr nnrrr" noises and
looking rather dazed. He was holding a drill with a somewhat molten blob
where the drill bit usually goes. It turns out that he'd managed to drill
straight into a big cable... though he later claimed "it wasn't me" (which
did make I laugh).

Then there was the chap who was inspecting an asphalt mixing machine when
the operator let rip with a quarter of a tonne of the stuff, oooh, not
comfy, though he survived remarkably intact.

One of the more gruesome industrial accidents that I've read about was that
of a chap working on a nuclear reactor thingy, ISTR that it was an
experimental reactor. Anyway something wasn't working properly and it was
all going badly wrong so they decided to perform an emergency shutdown (they
'scrammed' the reactor). Well the scram didn't work, the control rod
mechanism wasn't pushing the moderators back into place, so this chap
toddled off to stand on top of the reactor vessel and manually scram the
reactor by winding a winch wot not to push the control rods back down
between the fuel rods. Unfortunately he was too late. The reactor went pop,
not Chernobyl style pop, but pop nevertheless. When his body was recovered
his torso was found spiked to the ceiling by a rod, and all of his remains
bar one of his legs had to be taken away and disposed of as radioactive
waste, the remaining leg was buried in a shielded coffin. (This might sound
like a tall story, but I'll dig out my references if I have to).

 

[snip industrial accidents]

Don't forget the guy who fell into the lens grinding machine
and made a spectacle of himself.

 

<snip accident tales>

<fx: looks at paper cut. Decides to keep stum>

 

Hang on, me being dense here, I'm sure - did they stitch his hand
onto/into his stomach? Or take the skin off his stomach and put it on
his hand...?

 

AIUI I guess the technique Rope is describing is where the skin to be
grafted is left connected to the donor graft point until it's started
growing at on the injured area. IIRC this was done with a work
colleague some years back who needed a graft on his elbow. The initial
tries with draping skin from his arse on the wound didn't work, so he
spent some time in hospital whilst a live transfer took place.

 

But afterwards, could he tell his arse from his elbow?

 

It's called a pedicle, and was much used before micro-surgery was
refined to where it is today. It is _not_ a skin graft, but involves a
flap of flesh, which is generally taken from the stomach area. In
t'old days (20+ years ago) they'd carefully cut it and roll it into a
tube, leaving major blood supply to it intact, then attach the other
end to the part needing repair, where it would establish new capillary
connections within a few weeks, at which point it would be cut off
from the original area completely.

In some cases, the flap would have been moved three or more time, for
example, stomach-wrist, wrist-good leg, good leg-bad leg, before many
more ops to smooth and stretch the new flesh over the wounded area.
The original area is just left as a nasty scar, although genuine skin
grafts[1] are used to cover it up.

My ex had more than 20 ops over two years, then a couple more some
years later, to mend a nearly-amputated leg.


[1] Just the epidermis, shaved off with an instrument very much like a
potato-peeler and laid over the exposed area to form a seal while
healing, and scarring, takes place.

 

They use puppies?


+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
FISHWAVER
XL1000V

as the ocean tastes of but one thing, salt, so the truth has but one
flavour, that of freedom

 

Paper cut, was it?

 

<snip gruesome newklear plastic powered ashphalt forklifts>

When I were but a lad in my first job at a steelworks there occured a
terrible axledunt in which one of the molten-steel-carrying crucibles
upended in the wrong place and poured the contents all over 3 blokes
standing on the furnace shed floor.

Raised the carbon content a bit.

I was told (though I don't know if this is true) that a geezer threw
himself into the furnace one nightshift; he went on to become part of
the British car industry.


--

Dave

GS 850 x2 / SE 6a
SbS#6 DIAABTCOD#16 APOSTLE#6 FUB#3
FUB KotL OSOS#12? UKRMMA#19

 

Eeeep! Lucky bastard!

Unfortunately computer related stories don't usually make such good reading,
but here's a few:

Myself and my oppo were hauling the mother of all line printers out of the
machine room one day, shit that thing was *heavy*. Well the room had been
designed by our bossman, who was a little squirt of no more than 5'5" I
reckon. Myself and soft-lad are both over 6ft. So what happens? Soft-lad
stands up as we finally manage to win the battle twixt gravity and the
mother of all line printers when he bangs his head on one of the big red
emergency stop buttons.... ooops! Standing there in total darkness as the
room slowly died (sounds of disks spinning down etc) we didn't really give a
toss that we'd just wiped out most of our European IT facilities, oh no, our
first concern was how the **** we were going to get that brute of a printer
back onto its stand without dropping it on ourselves

Some time later said mother of all line printers was installed in our
accounts building (we got it moved from building to building by forklift)
when it developed a minor fault. We called in the maintenance contractor, a
*huge* chap of 6'9" and about 30 stone. Him being a bloody Titan what did he
do? He just picked it up and wandered off down the office with it. Ah, but
him being a clumsy oaf too what else did he do? Totally ignored the fact
that the fucker was still wired in and actually printing at the time....
*kerunch!* Not a happy moment for some, but oh how me and soft-lad laughed


Then there was the time that a cow-orker of mine was testing some new mail
distribution thingy she'd developed, whatever. Erm, 'whatever' included her
test messages being delivered to all mail recipients enterprise wide,
including external clients... tens of thousands of recipients at the very
least, maybe hundreds of thousands, possibly over a million. Because it was
taking so long for her stuff to come back to her mailbox she assumed that
she'd done something wrong, so she was sat there going through and testing
it again and again. It worked perfectly each and every time... ten or more
times she sent out her test message... which thankfully she had literally at
the last minute decided to change from summat like "**** this I am fucking
bored I want a fucking beer" to something a less offensive

Then there was the time that the development director issued my code to the
client test platform before I'd Ok'ed it... thank **** I had at the last
minute changed a certain 'supposedly-impossible-to-reach' error message from
something like "**** **** bollox and wank, this should never happen" to "Oh
Bugger"... they still weren't impressed, but it was funny

I'll stop there (for now).

 

<G>