ShepherdsDog ShepherdsDog:
A friend of mine in high school was given his birthday present a few days early. they were steel toed boots. He was loading grain into a hopper when the auger got clogged. he went to kick it to dislodge the clog and his foot slipped in. As it was he had to get skin grafts. It was the steel toe that jammed the thing solid and saved his foot. Another guy a year older than me lost his dad when the harrows fell on him. A girl I dated lost her dad when the tractor overturned along side a drainage ditch and pinned him under. My grade 12 organic chemistry teacher was also a farmer, and he lost his right thumb reaching into the combine and snagging a belt.
One of my granduncles pulled a real boner. When he was using anhydrous ammonia for the first time, a hose burst and he grabbed it with his bare hands...took awhile for the burns(freezing) to heal. I can't count the times that I've seen older farmers reach into seeders and mix treated seed with their bare hands. My mom's cousin lost half a dozen head of cattle that got into treated canola...they didn't go quick or painlessly, yet there he was, no gloves on evening it out in his seeder.
Personally, I've been stepped on and kicked by cattle and horses, treed by boars...and sows with young. Fortunately nothing too serious.
That's nothing. Try being a bureaucrat. A couple of weeks ago I developed a crcik in my neck because my $600 monitor stand was set too high. My first inclination was to adjust the stand. However I consdiered the Occupational Health and Safety implications--what if I set teh height incorrectly? what if I cause the monitor to fall, possibly glancing off my arm? So I opted for the rpudent route of contacting our OSH specialists. Following a $850 ergonomic assessment of my office, the specialist agreed with me that the monitor was too high, and we threw the monitor stand away. I ended up taking a few weeks sick leave though, just from the psychological trauma of the whole thing.
CKA Uber 
