Roofing
After my brief sojourn in the Army, I took the first job I could find when I got out. A roofing felter.

We were the blokes who would climb on roofs carrying boiling hot buckets of tar and put down a nice tarmac roof for you. Hard and dangerous work but bloody well paid.

So I was on this one job where we had to dismantle this huge glass roof/skylight, board it over and then felt the dam thing. We started off by removing all the glass panes and lowering them to the ground until we were, eventually, left with a metal skeleton. All steel girders. The next step was to dismantle the girders. This meant getting a spanner around the 40 year-old nuts and twisting them free. It was a bastard of a job. The heads n the nuts were rusted on solid and no amount of penetration oil was going to help. Use too much force and you just stripped the heads. I did this on one nut on the very edge of the building that held one of the main horizontal girders. Only thing to do now, was hacksaw the bastards off.

So there I was, 50ft up in the air with one arm wrapped around an upright support and the other arm trying to get a hacksaw blade onto this bloody nut. The position of the nut meant that I could only move the blade about 3mm at a time so it was incredibly slow going. Eventually, after about two hours, the blade cut through the last of the bolt and the nut fell free. With a sigh of relief I poked the bolt through it's hole and watched it fall 50ft to the ground.

Then job done, I stepped backwards. Into fresh air.

So there I was, falling through the air towards a concrete floor and the only thing running through my mind was:

"You cunt. You stupid fucking cunt"

I honestly didn't have time to be frightened. It was all so quick.

And then I landed, flat on my back, onto an old galvanised water tank. Squashed the bugger flat and walked away without a scratch. But I did start shaking after a few minutes and threw my guts up.

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Wed 2 Jan 2008, 4:44, 6 replies)

well
You're amazingly lucky then I suppose.
(fisherOfApples123 -=destroyer of toilets=-, Wed 2 Jan 2008, 6:27, closed)

Nope
Amazingly lucky would have not to have fallen off in the first place.

But I should tell the story of who's job I'd taken. He was amazingly unlucky - and stupid.

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Wed 2 Jan 2008, 6:59, closed)

.
Do tell...
(misanthrope is so adjective he's verbing nouns!, Wed 2 Jan 2008, 9:25, closed)

hee hee
you said "penetration oil"!

great story, my older brother did something similar: he was up a ladder washing windows and stood back to "admire his work"

*clicked*
(JasperSinister is offering two tickets to the gun show, Wed 2 Jan 2008, 10:33, closed)

I
think we have a winner


*click*
( ogwen69 has returned from Reddit, Wed 2 Jan 2008, 14:51, closed)

Roofing not to be mistaken for rofling
Hmm I reckon from me sums you would have been doing about 40 mph when you landed... on to a water tank... I dunno most people would at least have been winded for a little while... or suffered internal damage as their organs bounced off their ribcage. I liked the story though although the Badger alternate ending is you lay there and threw up on yourself. Because everyone likes stories where people end up vomiting on themselves!
( TGB checking Off Topic is still shit at, Wed 2 Jan 2008, 16:29, closed)