Accidents and Near-Death Experiences Part 3

Last time I told you about how I flash-fried my ankle and got the biggest uppercut of my life. Today I continue with this trend. Yes I know you would rather read an Adventure of a Viking-Kind and I did promise I will make one soon, but the job switch has me on the backfoot at the moment, so just bare with me.

Javelins and Grenades

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This incident happened back when I was only five years old. My best friend at the time had a huge backyard. I mean really huge. You could literally build four more copies of their house in the backyard alone. Right in the middle of the yard was a large rectangular braai area surrounded by old stone pillars, supporting large wooden beams, covered in ivy so much that you could sit in the shade anywhere in there.

Next to the braai area were a few pine trees, and next to them was a tiny bamboo forest in the corner of the yard. Insert two children, aged five, and with vivid imaginations. Pine cones became grenades and bamboo sticks became javelins. So it was not really era specific or accurate, but we did not care. We just played with whatever we had.

Throwing the grenades and javelins at each other--extremely inaccurately--we never once managed to hit the other. Now insert an older brother into this game. His older brother was about ten years older (I am unsure about the exact age gap) and therefore much larger and stronger than we were. He stepped back a few paces and threw a javelin at me.
The bamboo sticks we threw at each other were quite small compared to the one traveling at me in an arc through the air at that moment. I stood completely still and looked straight at the oncoming projectile. Until it was too late. It hit me in the face. Luckily, it was a really big piece of bamboo and the edges of the hole went around my eye socket when it hit me.

I fell backwards with the bamboo javelin only falling away once I hit the ground. The moment I stood up, I was covered in blood. Facial wounds tend to bleed profusely. Naturally, I was bawling my eyes out and we ran to the house. By this time my friend’s brother pulled a disappearing act that Houdini would have been proud of.

My mom and my friend’s mom came out from the commotion and when my mother saw me, covered in blood, she freaked out. Fortunately my friend’s mom kept her cool and rushed me to the car. Still fortunately they lived almost right next to the hospital which was our destination.

I got four stitches under my eye and it was one of the freakiest feelings to sit and watch the doctor stick that curved needle into me, right under my eye. I had to wear an eye patch for quite a while for the wound to properly heal. Again fortunately for me, my birthday was only a few days away and I had the perfect excuse to throw a pirate party, eye patch and all.

Ladders and Old Bastards

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As many of you know already, I fell off a ladder not so long ago and hurt my shoulder in the process. This is basically the long version of that story.

We were rewiring a school building that day and only had that day to finish up to a certain point because the school started the next day. We ended up reaching our goal for the day and it was about time to clock out when the old man I worked with got into his head that we should pull in one more circuit.

I did not object to this as I was unaware of the time. We got busy and after a while we were almost halfway done. This was when I looked at the time and realised he screwed us royally. Of course, we had to finish the circuit before we could leave. You cannot have wires hanging around for a day with children running around, even if the circuit was dead and in no way capable of getting current.

This pissed me off quite a bit and I tried to hurry as much as I could so that I could go home already. I have to add: at this point we would not have received overtime compensation for the two and a half hours it took us to finish.
When we were nearly done, we ran into a snag. The hole that I drilled through the wall was a tiny bit too small for the cables to get through in one classroom. This was not my fault as I had to drill through a structural support beam and we did not have a large enough drill bit for this operation.

Eventually the cables got through the wall, and inside the classroom we absolutely struggled our asses off to fit the cables into the trunking the way the old man liked it. He set up the straight ladder inside the classroom against the wall. This ladder has a bit of a quirk. On one end, one of the rubbers is missing, on the other, no such problem. Being the anally-retentive bastard that he is, he set up the ladder with the missing rubber on the floor instead of against the wall, because that is the “right-side-up”. As if that matters when it comes to a straight ladder?

The floor of the classrooms were concrete slabs, painted to a very smooth finish. Me on the ladder putting the trunking lid on, had to bang it in place with my hand so it would lock in place correctly. This constant banging against the wall caused the ladder to move. This was all that was needed for the ladder to lose grip and start sliding down the wall toward the floor.

In a moment of pure luck/karma/divine retribution, the old bastard was standing under the ladder when this happened and I ended up falling on top of him with the ladder and then from him to the floor, still with the ladder. Rebounding from him and then the floor really hurt my shoulder.

The job was not done though, and we managed to finish it eventually and go home. I struggled to drive, because my shoulder really hurt when I moved my arm in any way. I told my boss what happened over the phone and told him I might not make it to work the next day. Sure enough, the next morning I was in complete agony. I only managed to get to the doctor two days after the accident and he booked me off until the next week.

During the first week of this month, things finally escalated to the point where he pissed me off so much that I nearly punched him in the face. The result of this was that I had to quit my job and lucky for me, my old boss was in need of workers again and I basically transferred back with no hard feelings between me and my employers (they are brothers, too).

So now I work in construction again and the result is that I am beat by the time I get home from work, which is why I am so inactive with the blogging part of things. This also concludes this series, for now anyways. I am sure I will have new content for it at some point in the future.