I no longer work for investment banks
I now live in the French Alps, driving ski lifts. Whilst most work accidents are of the "I fell over skiing and fucked my knees" kind, there are a few more "interesting" ones.

For instance, when I started, we had to do a basic safety course, and the instructor, who was also the resort's head mechanic, was insisting on the importance of not starting a lift until you're absolutely, 100% sure it's safe to do so. Especially if there are people working on it, and even more so if your only contact with them is by walkie-talkie. At this point, he raised his hand, which was minus 3 half fingers - he'd been working on the top pulley of a draglift, told the driver to *not* start the lift as he had his hands between cable and pulley. The driver had misheard this as "start the lift" and that's 3 fingers chopped in half. Stories like this are not uncommon, and usually involve the victim being between the spokes of, or sat on, the pulley when the lift starts, and thus either chopped in half or less 2 legs.

Where I currently work, one colleague accidentally dropped a large spanner on a colleague's head, landing him in hospital for 3 weeks.

Another good one is the piste grooming machines. When they are on really steep pitches, they anchor themselves to the top of the slope, and winch themselves up and down. Of course, as they move across the slope, the winch cable, which has 10 tons of grooming machine on the end of it, has a tendency to move laterally as well. This movement is usually jerky, resulting in a 12mm steel cable whipping across the top of the slope. The grooming machines work at night, and more than a few unaware nighttime skiiers have been bisected by cables they hadn't even seen.

Grooming machines work, largely, via hydraulics, and this is why one of our mechanics has the tip missing from his index finger. There was, it seems, a slow leak in one of the hydraulic lines on one of the machines, so he ran his finger down the line to see if he could feel where it was leaking. The nearly-invisible jet of hydraulic fluid in the still-pressurised system cut the end of his finger off.

Meanwhile, client-side, there's a good number of our clients who ski with the shoulder straps of their salopettes hanging around their arses. Sure, it looks "hip", and "young" and "groovy", but they also have a tendency to catch on the chairlift chairs. What generally happens is that the skiier comes off the chair at 15kph or so, and continues going forwards, whilst the chair goes round the pulley and heads off in the other direction at 15kph or so. Inbetween the two is an elastic shoulder strap, and when it comes to a battle between 450 kilos of steel driven by a 600 horsepower motor and a bit of elastic, the loser is fairly easy to guess. The first thing that happens is the skiier falls over, as they are now attached to a very solid something moving at 15kph in the opposite direction. What happens next is down to luck. If they are lucky, the strap(s) are ripped off entirely, and added to the lift's "trophy pile". If they are less lucky, they stretch to about 5m long before letting go and flying back with a resounding "snap" into the witless fucker's arse. This always gets a grin. If they are *really* unlucky, the arse comes out of the trousers with the straps, and the whole lot comes back to slap them handily in the bollocks. Seen that happen twice. It was hard not to laugh, so I didn't try.

It's hard to laugh about skiiers actually hurting themselves on the slopes. It gets really nasty, especially with collisions. Consider that a ski or snowboard is basically a 1.5m or longer double edged razor blade travelling at speed, with upwards of 80 kilos of fuckwit on it. Broken bones are OK (unless they are open fractures), but it's really nasty to find a kiddie on the slopes desperately trying to hold the flapping remains of their cheek in place.

We have "phantom shitters" too. Big logs coiled on the toilet seats, used tampax on the floor, shit smeared on the walls, I see it all. *And* I get to clean it up.

Snowmobiles are fun, too. Get to drive one occasionally, but it's never in good weather. They are pretty easy to endo or roll, which is embarassing enough, but the worst is parking one and have it run away downhill and bury itself in the nearest pylon/tree/snowdrift.

And I haven't even started on when I worked as a motorcycle courier.
(m.auron, Sun 8 Sep 2013, 18:55, 5 replies)

Why bother with a "grooming machine" when we already have the internet?

( Dr Preference AjcuiVd289, Sun 8 Sep 2013, 19:35, closed)

i was a courier in london for a year.
saw some amazing accidents.
( janet aylia y'all motherfuckers need jesus, Mon 9 Sep 2013, 8:37, closed)

I did it for 4 years.
Got knocked off a few times, but never saw any particularly grizzly ones.
(username failed moderation, Mon 9 Sep 2013, 13:03, closed)

liked
interestingly gruesome stuff
(Cov Boy, Mon 9 Sep 2013, 15:45, closed)

I sent this to my daughter, who worked on a Swiss golf course which in winter became a ski slope
and she told me all about the dangerous stuff she got up to!
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Mon 9 Sep 2013, 23:51, closed)