Sunday, June 8, 2008

Yet Another Edition of "Things I Shouldn't Have Done At Work."

Warning...this post contains a couple pictures that aren't for the squemish. I'll leave them to the very end so you can avoid them if you must.


So, we were a tad understaffed when striking the arena on Friday night from our commencement set up, which put me in the always unenviable position of doing a job by myself that really should be done by two people.

I was up in our scissors lift, cutting down a run of power and audio cables following the ceiling support beams. Normally, another person would be behind me, coiling the cables in to the left so we can ultimately drop them behind the back truss/backdrop where the run ultimately terminates. This also takes the slack off the cable so it doesn't simply drop flat when the tie-line is cut.

But I didn't have that person.

To my credit, I got 3/4 of the way through before it bit me in the ass.

By it, I mean my knife.

By bit I mean cut.

By the ass I mean my thumb.

As I held the slack myself with my left hand, I went to cut the tie-line down. The lift swayed ever so slightly, and on instinct my left hand holding the cable moved with it...right under the path of the knife.

To my double credit, I dropped neither the cable nor did I drop the knife 60 feet to the deck. Not that there was anybody there, but there could have been. And as I had learned the hard way, my knife is plenty sharp. I proceeded to turn the lift in to a biohazard zone as I called down for someone to immediately run for the first aid kid. I looked frantically around the lift looking for the roll of paper towels that usually resides there. Of course, with my luck this night, it wasn't there. There was a towel of dubious origin, and in my "stop the flow quick" mentality, I grabbed it. Well, after about three seconds and the realization that the towel shouldn't be quite that stiff, I dropped it, and took off my shirt. Luckily, I had a t-shirt underneath, or this story would have taken a turn for the extreme worse.

After a few minutes, some painful rubs of an alcohol wipe, and a lot of gauze and tape, I was back in action. I did have to redress the wound, basically mummifying my thumb for the rest of the night, but ultimately got through it. Though Jessie thinks I may have needed stitches. I dunno, I didn't need stitches when I caught my thumb (same damn one, too) between a socket wrench and truss, and basically "popped it" open. I still have the nifty L shaped scar to prove it. And that bled as bad, or maybe even worse. I think it looks worse than it is. Now's the time for you to be the judge...another warning, here comes the pictures I warned you about:
















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4 comments:

  1. No, I did not, though several people think I should have. It probably would have been like, max, two stitches. It was more a slice than a down right cut or gash, really.

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  2. But even those one or two stitches would have prevented it from flying open like I'm sure it has several times. Daniel had a cut like that on his finger once, too. Didn't let me stitch it up. It was earlier in my training and he said he didn't want me to practice on him. :-P

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  3. It hasn't really flied open. It bled a little longer (like, a really slooooow leak) than a normal cut, but it's all good now.

    Now the one on my other side that I talked about, from getting my thumb cut between a truss and a wrench? That constantly few open and probably needed stitches.

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