Randy B wrote:I have a feeling that I would quickly invest in steel toe shoes (I wonder if they make them in dress shoes in addition to boots) and some athletic shin guards.
They do make steel toed dress shoes, any industrial or culinary shoe supplier will carry them.
I have two stupid accidents; on 8 April 1990 I was working in the Dairy Queen in Camden, Delaware and was cleaning one of the ice cream machines out at the end of the night. I had just gotten out of the Navy (in Orlando, coincidentally) that morning, and therefore had not cleaned an ice cream machine for quite a while. I had totally forgotten that the mixer bar on our ice cream machines was attached by two bolts. I removed what I dimly and incorrectly remembered as the single bolt, and then went to the front of the machine to pull out the bar. It wouldn't budge, so I got this contraption that is basically a big moving weight on a steel bar that you use to remove the mixing bar when it's stubborn. I kept slamming the weight onto the backstop and was getting very frustrated that nothing was happening. Finally, I used all of my might and really, really slammed the weight. Only, I slammed it so hard that I didn't have time to get my finger out of the way, and squished it pretty good. There's still a scar on that finger.
In 1998 I was working as a metal caster in a dental lab in Newark, Delaware. We had a slate board that we would leave the metal rings that hold the molds on while they cooled down after casting. I casted several rings in the morning, then went and did something else for a few hours, then casted several more rings and then went to break. I was the only caster at the time and had a system for placing the rings so that I would always know which rings where hot and which were cold. While I was on break, my boss came in and cast a ring and put it with my cold rings. When I came back from break, I just grabbed the first ring from the cold ring section of the slate, only it wasn't a cold ring, it was the one my boss had recently cast. Fortunately, it was cold enough that I only got a first degree burn, but it was still quite painful.
My last job before Disney was as security at the Valero refinery in Delaware City, Delaware. I think most people would think that an oil refinery is a more dangerous place to work than Main Street East Merchandise, but the refinery would get up over a hundred days without an injury and there were departments with over a thousand. Our record in Main Street East is 35, and we spend a lot of time in the single digits. My only explanation is that things at the refinery where obviously dangerous (pretty much everybody there knew someone who had died on the job), while people in Merchandise don't really think of their workplace as having a lot of potential injuries. I know the Magic Kingdom doesn't catch fire as often as the refinery did, and it's a lot less likely to blow up if it does. There's nothing like a good fire at the hydrocracker or someone being dissolved by sulfuric acid to remind you you need to be careful! Although to be fair, the guy that was dissolved wasn't doing anything wrong, that was someone else's screw up.
-Harry
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason. -Jack Handy
