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» Lurid Work Stories
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.
(Sun 8th Sep 2013, 18:55, More)
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.
(Sun 8th Sep 2013, 18:55, More)
» Lurid Work Stories
A while back
I used to work for a large investment bank. My team looked after data feeds from the front office, where all the high paid barrow boys work, and back office, where people actually work. As the IT support people were elsewhere in the building, it wasn't always possible to contact them by phone, so we had implemented an instant messaging system that would hit them with a console message wherever they were. It was dead handy, but, as with all "dead handy" things, it got abused.
The rot set in with collating the bets for the office betting pool every other morning without it being obvious what was going on, went on to "organising trips to the strip clubs on Whitechapel Road", and slowly degraded into something that was taking up a lot of time. It was the "text-based fantasy spice girl mud wrestling" that got us into trouble. Unbeknownst to us, the office grass (who disapproved seriously of the betting pool) was logging everything, and the aforementioned TBFSGMW was, as he saw it, his chance of glory. Especially the bit Jim added where "the girl from HR with the big tits" joined in and the whole thing turned into a rather fun text-based fantasy lesbian romp. He duly logged the lot and turned it over to, of course, the girl from HR with the big tits.
Somehow we didn't eventually get fired - the girl from HR obviously had a sense of humour and had expunged the more gory bits before passing it upstream to management - although it was a close run thing and the meeting to discuss what sanctions should be applied was, shall we say, "stony" (although, once it was over, the boss indicated he knew the logs had been sanitised, and that he found the whole thing rather amusing). The chat server had to go, obviously, which was a shame.
The office grass suddenly found himself excluded from daily life, and within a week he asked for, and was granted, a transfer to another team. He handed in his resignation within a month; everyone in the building knew what had happened (and although several were slightly miffed not to have been invited onto our "private" chats, his new teammates were pretty much all disgusted that he had dobbed us in) so he took his pariah status with him.
And the girl from HR with the big tits started coming to the pub with us. But not the strip joints on the Whitechapel Road. She was definitely fun, but Jim got the lesbian bit wrong.
(Fri 6th Sep 2013, 18:54, More)
A while back
I used to work for a large investment bank. My team looked after data feeds from the front office, where all the high paid barrow boys work, and back office, where people actually work. As the IT support people were elsewhere in the building, it wasn't always possible to contact them by phone, so we had implemented an instant messaging system that would hit them with a console message wherever they were. It was dead handy, but, as with all "dead handy" things, it got abused.
The rot set in with collating the bets for the office betting pool every other morning without it being obvious what was going on, went on to "organising trips to the strip clubs on Whitechapel Road", and slowly degraded into something that was taking up a lot of time. It was the "text-based fantasy spice girl mud wrestling" that got us into trouble. Unbeknownst to us, the office grass (who disapproved seriously of the betting pool) was logging everything, and the aforementioned TBFSGMW was, as he saw it, his chance of glory. Especially the bit Jim added where "the girl from HR with the big tits" joined in and the whole thing turned into a rather fun text-based fantasy lesbian romp. He duly logged the lot and turned it over to, of course, the girl from HR with the big tits.
Somehow we didn't eventually get fired - the girl from HR obviously had a sense of humour and had expunged the more gory bits before passing it upstream to management - although it was a close run thing and the meeting to discuss what sanctions should be applied was, shall we say, "stony" (although, once it was over, the boss indicated he knew the logs had been sanitised, and that he found the whole thing rather amusing). The chat server had to go, obviously, which was a shame.
The office grass suddenly found himself excluded from daily life, and within a week he asked for, and was granted, a transfer to another team. He handed in his resignation within a month; everyone in the building knew what had happened (and although several were slightly miffed not to have been invited onto our "private" chats, his new teammates were pretty much all disgusted that he had dobbed us in) so he took his pariah status with him.
And the girl from HR with the big tits started coming to the pub with us. But not the strip joints on the Whitechapel Road. She was definitely fun, but Jim got the lesbian bit wrong.
(Fri 6th Sep 2013, 18:54, More)
» Lurid Work Stories
A few more ski resort stories
3.5m/s is a relatively sudden acceleration, so there is a system of springs and pistons in the pole to take the "sting" out of the takeoff. These springs being fucked is why some draglifts almost force your bollocks up and out through your throat when they start up.
Anyway, this bloke arrives at a particularly savage draglift I was working on. ignores the sign saying "remove straps, hold poles in right hand". Grabs lift and rams the button between his legs, triggering takeoff. Also manages to get his left ski pole jammed in the machinery. So the lift is pulling him up at 3.5m/s, the springs are being compressed, and h is being held in place by his left ski pole. Which he can't let go of now, because the strap is tight around his wrist. By the time I'd hit the "stop" button and the machine's inertia had died down, he was horizontal between machine and lift pole, suspended about 4 feet in midair. With a dislocated shoulder and a broken wrist.
On the same lift, I arrived on my snowboard, waved at my colleague, grabbed the pole, to find my bastard colleague was *holding me back* until the springs were fully compressed, before letting me go. I *flew* the first 50 yards or so, before wiping out spectacularly.
Now, I said I'd come back to mechanisms. So, at the business end of a draglift there are two electromechanical bits - the selector and the release. The selector lets one pole through at a time, and teh release is what lets it go when you grab the pole. If the selector is fucked, you might get 2 or 3, or more, poles let go at once, but usually you notice beforehand. You can't let them go up the slope next to each other, or they will lever the cable off the pulleys, so you need to stop the lift, then manually pull the poles *up* the cable until they are separated by a couple of metres each. What happens when your selector is *totally* fucked, it's your first day on the job, and the first "test" pole you fire off results in *two hundred and twenty* lift poles firing off at the same time, I'll leave you to imagine.
Slaloming on draglifts is not recommended, either. c.f. signs. If you manage to pull the cable off the pulleys (not too hard to do) it will either slam into the ground (if you've managed to decable a support pylon), possibly cutting you in two in the process, or shoot up into the air (for compression pylons) and catapult you up with it. I've seen the latter, where a snowboarder had fallen, was being dragged by the pole and hadn't let go, decabled a compression at which point he was forced to let go and the 7-8 year old behind him got a trip up and over the other side of the lift...
(Tue 10th Sep 2013, 21:21, More)
A few more ski resort stories
3.5m/s is a relatively sudden acceleration, so there is a system of springs and pistons in the pole to take the "sting" out of the takeoff. These springs being fucked is why some draglifts almost force your bollocks up and out through your throat when they start up.
Anyway, this bloke arrives at a particularly savage draglift I was working on. ignores the sign saying "remove straps, hold poles in right hand". Grabs lift and rams the button between his legs, triggering takeoff. Also manages to get his left ski pole jammed in the machinery. So the lift is pulling him up at 3.5m/s, the springs are being compressed, and h is being held in place by his left ski pole. Which he can't let go of now, because the strap is tight around his wrist. By the time I'd hit the "stop" button and the machine's inertia had died down, he was horizontal between machine and lift pole, suspended about 4 feet in midair. With a dislocated shoulder and a broken wrist.
On the same lift, I arrived on my snowboard, waved at my colleague, grabbed the pole, to find my bastard colleague was *holding me back* until the springs were fully compressed, before letting me go. I *flew* the first 50 yards or so, before wiping out spectacularly.
Now, I said I'd come back to mechanisms. So, at the business end of a draglift there are two electromechanical bits - the selector and the release. The selector lets one pole through at a time, and teh release is what lets it go when you grab the pole. If the selector is fucked, you might get 2 or 3, or more, poles let go at once, but usually you notice beforehand. You can't let them go up the slope next to each other, or they will lever the cable off the pulleys, so you need to stop the lift, then manually pull the poles *up* the cable until they are separated by a couple of metres each. What happens when your selector is *totally* fucked, it's your first day on the job, and the first "test" pole you fire off results in *two hundred and twenty* lift poles firing off at the same time, I'll leave you to imagine.
Slaloming on draglifts is not recommended, either. c.f. signs. If you manage to pull the cable off the pulleys (not too hard to do) it will either slam into the ground (if you've managed to decable a support pylon), possibly cutting you in two in the process, or shoot up into the air (for compression pylons) and catapult you up with it. I've seen the latter, where a snowboarder had fallen, was being dragged by the pole and hadn't let go, decabled a compression at which point he was forced to let go and the 7-8 year old behind him got a trip up and over the other side of the lift...
(Tue 10th Sep 2013, 21:21, More)
» Exposed!
So, years back...
...I was sharing a flat with my best friend's mum. Long story, don't ask. So, anyway, I'm living in a just-becoming-groovy part of east London, sharing a half-derelict warehouse with a late-50s german woman. I'm spending vast amounts of time out drinking and dancing the night away, and having one night stands. So, inevitably, one night, I end up back at mine, 3 sheets to the wind with a rather gorgeous redhead. I needed to go for a pee, so staggered downstairs, tripped on the exceptionally steep and slippery stairs, and crashed to a heap at the bottom. Redhead came down to see what's happening, also slipped, lands on top of me. So as we're pissing ourselves laughing, flatmate / mates mum comes downstairs to see what all the fuss is about (this is at 4AM) and discovers 2 naked drunks tangled in each other, in fits of laughter.
She vass not amussed! For weeks I was referred to as "ferry bad boy".
(Fri 9th Aug 2013, 20:15, More)
So, years back...
...I was sharing a flat with my best friend's mum. Long story, don't ask. So, anyway, I'm living in a just-becoming-groovy part of east London, sharing a half-derelict warehouse with a late-50s german woman. I'm spending vast amounts of time out drinking and dancing the night away, and having one night stands. So, inevitably, one night, I end up back at mine, 3 sheets to the wind with a rather gorgeous redhead. I needed to go for a pee, so staggered downstairs, tripped on the exceptionally steep and slippery stairs, and crashed to a heap at the bottom. Redhead came down to see what's happening, also slipped, lands on top of me. So as we're pissing ourselves laughing, flatmate / mates mum comes downstairs to see what all the fuss is about (this is at 4AM) and discovers 2 naked drunks tangled in each other, in fits of laughter.
She vass not amussed! For weeks I was referred to as "ferry bad boy".
(Fri 9th Aug 2013, 20:15, More)
» Near Death Experiences II
Had a good few of these, mostly motorcycle related.
Probably the most memorable was having my front tyre blow out after hitting a smashed bottle at 140mph+. German motorway, before you ask. I highsided the bike trying to save it and somehow came out of that unscathed, then slid down the road (thank the lord for leathers; if you're gonna lose skin on the tarmac, make sure it's not yours) watching the crash barriers getting inexorably closer. My feet against the barrier stopped me, at approximately the same time I realised that I now had 170kg of originally expensive metal and plastic chasing me. The bike itself was going end-over-end and somehow managed to bounce over me, the rear wheel clipped my shoulder.
When it's not your time, its not your time.
No Otters were harmed.
(Sun 18th May 2014, 19:24, More)
Had a good few of these, mostly motorcycle related.
Probably the most memorable was having my front tyre blow out after hitting a smashed bottle at 140mph+. German motorway, before you ask. I highsided the bike trying to save it and somehow came out of that unscathed, then slid down the road (thank the lord for leathers; if you're gonna lose skin on the tarmac, make sure it's not yours) watching the crash barriers getting inexorably closer. My feet against the barrier stopped me, at approximately the same time I realised that I now had 170kg of originally expensive metal and plastic chasing me. The bike itself was going end-over-end and somehow managed to bounce over me, the rear wheel clipped my shoulder.
When it's not your time, its not your time.
No Otters were harmed.
(Sun 18th May 2014, 19:24, More)