What in the hell …

Because of reading about these women who got hurt on mangles this was on my mind.

My workplace injury story:

Just before I turned 18 I got a job at a truss factory with my uncle, on second shift. I got paid either $7.50 or $8.10 an hour, I can’t remember. I know we got a 50 or 60 cent per hour bonus for working that shift. We built the trusses that go in the floors and roofs of buildings. My job was pretty simple. I worked closely with this guy named John. Me and John did like three things. One was to use nail guns to affix drywall to some trusses. We would set a truss up on saw horses, put a sheet of drywall on it, nail it in place, then cut the excess drywall off. It took a few sheets per truss, they were pretty big. We did that out in the yard. The forklift operator would bring us trusses and pick up the ones we had drywalled. Not very many had to have that done. A second thing we did was to help flip over trusses inside. Other people would cut boards. Other people would lay the boards out into truss shape and put them on these moving rollers. Sometimes we’d work on these this part too – we’d run around and put nail plates on all the joints, then they’d roll under big steam roller presses which pushed the nails into the trusses. After they came out of the press, they had to be flipped over and carried back up to put nail plates on the other side of the joints. Some of the trusses were 20 feet long and 10 or more feet high. It took several people to flip them, and the joints weren’t always real steady because they only had plates one side. After the trusses had been plated and pressed on both sides they had to be rolled out to the yard (the last rollers on the line didn’t move themselves). We pushed the trusses that were finished along and out like this giant mail slot, onto an outdoor roller. From there we did the third part of our job. We pushed the trusses off the rollers and onto racks. Then we stood them up and used banding tape to bundle them into units of about ten each, for the forklift drivers to come and pick up and put on trucks. If there weren’t enough to be banded yet we used a chain to hold them in place.

It was cold and rainy and really windy, I had just gotten there. Dayshift didn’t seem to have done anything. We were really busy and there were a lot of trusses on the racks. Some were standing up and some weren’t and none had been banded. John and I banded the ones that were laying flat because that was easier. We planned to band the ones that were standing up next, and we were going to go get a forklift driver to clear the banded trusses off the racks. We didn’t realize it but day shift hadn’t put the chain on the trusses that were standing. We were kneeling in front of the trusses that were standing, banding the ones that were laying down, when Raul started yelling look out. We looked up and he was rushing toward the trusses which were standing, and they were falling toward us. John and I both ducked down into a squat, trying to get low enough that the bundle of trusses lying on the rack would shield us. Raul caught some of the trusses but 3 or 5 of them fell on us. One hit me in the head and in the left hand. Luckily I had my hard hat on. Sometimes I didn’t, because it was uncomfortable and I didn’t think it was necessary. My head was fine. My hand wasn’t, though I said it was. I walked around a while swearing. The boss talked to me. I said I wanted to go home. He said I had to see a doctor first. I drove myself to the doctor that the company did all the medical stuff through and the drug testing and all that. My hand hurt every time I touched the steering wheel so I knew I wasn’t fine. Ends up I broke the knuckle on my ring or middle finger, I forget which. (I broke the other in wrestling practice my freshman year of high school, my last sporty thing I did.) The break was small, across the rounded bit, the corner sort of, of the bulb of one of my knuckles. The break meant that little bit of the bulb was just sort of floating there. They said it didn’t need a cast just a splint but if it healed wrong they would need to rebreak it and put a pin it. I couldn’t use it for about 6 weeks. I saw a lawyer briefly, who showed me a chart of how many weeks pay (at I think 2/3 regular full time pay – a lot of our money came from overtime pay) each body part was worth if it was temporarily or permanently disabled. I remember thinking that was really strange. My mom talked me out of the lawyer thing, she said it might keep me from getting another job in the future.

My near-miss:

I worked as a stage carpenter in college, building sets for plays. I really liked working in the scene shop. I like my co-workers. I liked that we could listen to music while we worked. I liked my boss. I liked the work. At the time and in that place I could handle living on the $5 and change per hour that I got paid, not least because I had never made much more than that at any other job so I didn’t really realize how little money that was. I worked there for three years. One day I came to work sick. I had had a very bad cold or maybe an undiagnosed sinus infection – I get sinus trouble a lot. Anyway, my face hurt and my head felt completely congested. That made it hard to sleep. The cold medicine made my face hurt less and made it easier to breathe. It also made me groggy (and the sleeplessness didn’t help), though I didn’t realize it right away. I was working on the band saw, pushing wood into the saw following a pencil drawing drawn on blocks of wood, in order to cut the wood into shapes for use as ornamentation on a set piece. It took very little for the saw to cut through the wood. No more pressure than that exerted by one hand on another during a friendly handshake was enough to push the saw blade through the wood. Periodically bits of the wood would come off near the blade. It was important to remove those because there was a slim but real chance they could bump into the blade – moved by the vibration of the saw – and be sent flying out from the saw to break something or hurt someone. They also just got in the way of operating the saw. The standard procedure was to turn the saw off in that case, wait for the blade to stop moving completely, then remove the errant piece of wood. In my cold and medicine induced haze I wasn’t thinking and I reached for a block of wood right next to the blade. My hand got about two inches from the blade when I had the thought, “what am I doing?” Any part of my hand that had touched the saw blade would have no longer been a part of my hand, and probably would have meant pulling more of my hand into the saw. I turned the machine off, took my goggles off, got a drink of water, and went for a walk. I came back the shop and told my boss I was too sick to work and I was going home.