Before I grew up and realised I needed a career...
...I got a job at a place where my older brother was working, sanding down what would eventually be antique replica furniture. A crap monkey job, but if you were willing to knuckle down you could make some respectable coin, and I was, so I did until something better came along.

So there we were one Saturday morning when some adjustments were being made to the two laquering spray booths in the back room. Now, the laquer is highly flammable and the booths were caked in it so why the guy doing the tinkering saw fit to use an angle grinder on the booths before cleaning them down eludes me even now, aside from the now commonly-accepted theory that he was just thick as pigshit.

Shortly after Chump Change had begun showering the booths with superheated fragments of metal, one of the lads who worked in the room where these booths were ran out screaming 'FIRE! FIRE!'. Looking through the door, we observed that there certainly was a fire in there and oh my, it was really loving that laquer. Fol-de-rie ensued.

So, digest this simple equation; highly flammable chemicals on fire + a prefab industrial unit that produces items made entirely of wood, fabric, more flammable chemicals and upholstery materials = the place started to go up big-time. Our boss decided that while we were waiting for the stalwart helmeted hosey blokes to arrive, we should attempt to save as much of the stock as possible. Bear in mind that this was a pretty shitty job and I didn't much like the boss so I should have told him to go fuck himself right there, but no - I helped out moving stuff out of the door while the bloody place was burning around us.

My brother was also helping out, throwing these chair-shaped protective quilty things to me from a loft storage area. One of them was on fire when he threw it down to me and instead of catching it (or not, considering it was on fucking fire), it opened like a parachute on its way down and I ended up inside it. To his credit, only a few seconds had passed before my brother had jumped down the twelve-or-so feet from the loft and dragged it off me. It was at that point we both decided that our boss could indeed go fuck himself, or burn to death saving his overpriced bits of wood, whichever came soonest. The stalwart ones arrived soon after and took care of the fire before it got ruinously bad. The extractor fans in the booths were running throughout, they said, and that had had a strong limiting effect. The booths were fucked-up though, as was a good third of the stock.

That day my mum was mooching around a market in the town where we worked, and my brother saw her when he went to pick up some lunch after most of the excitement had passed (boss didn't even send us home - he put us back to work in the stinking-of-smoke unit restoring the stock that had been fire/smoke damaged - cunt). My brother told her about the fire, adding, 'oh, and our kid was on fire for a bit but don't worry, he's okay'. She came back to the unit with him to make sure I hadn't been transformed into Freddy Krueger - imagine how much stick I got from the lads for that :)

EPILOGUE (this post is long enough to warrant one) - I was told long after I left the place for the aforementioned something better that the boss had been fined to his undies by the authorities for numerous breaches of safety regs, including locking and padlocking the fire door in the laquering room, failing to immediately evacuate the premises and operating a big portable gas heater adjacent to the laquering booths and other related flammable stuff - apparently if the heater's sizeable gas bottle had gone boom, it would have killed pretty much everyone who was still in the building so I say again; cunt. And again; utter cunt. And once more with feeling; money grubbing, careless, thoughtless yuppie cunt of a cunt's cunty cunt, the cunt.
(thatblokeoverthere not quite as much an arsehole as I thought, Thu 3 Nov 2005, 11:05, Reply)