Had a close call at work...

[Plucketeer]

25. Most of my working life

I was an electrician. First with aircraft, then with automobiles and finally with heavy industrial machinery. It was during my aircraft electrician time that I had my closest call. It was the electrician's job to install the explosive squibbs in aerial tankers. These charges looked like shotgun shells but were several inches in diameter. Their purpose is to propel a wedge-shaped blade so that the blade severs an air-to-air refueling hose if it should get tangled around the aircraft being fueled in flight.
We had a checklist for a very strict regimen regarding the installation of these charges. And as usual, we followed that checklist to a tee. Once everyone had signed off on that checklist, I would ascend the workstand that we had to use to access the opening where the charges got installed. This had me basically IN a hole and 13 FEET off the ground. My fellow technicians were standing by in the event I needed help.
So I load the two charges into their respective barrels and that went just fine. Then I started the huge nuts on that held these explosives in place. The first one went on OK, the second one..... All I remember was a bright orange flash and instant deafness. Had I not held that big nut in just the right fashion, I'd be doing this keyboard with just one hand. And having been deafened instantaneously, I was hollering at the top of my lungs: "I'M OK, I'M OK, I'M OK!!!" while reflexively ducking out of the hole and walking backwards. I never thought about the fact that the workstand's guard rails had been lowered so that it would fit close enough to the access hole. I stumbled backwards - right off the workstand. Thanking my lucky stars, my fellow workers were there to catch me - literally - as I plummeted!
There are plastic pellets in those charges and a whole bunch of them perforated my right arm. It looked alot more horrific than it really was. But boy did we wake up the nurses station that night! The head nurse took one look at my arm - riddled with chunks of black pellets and looking like hamburger and said: "There's NO WAY I'm gonna work with that!" So with her pouring on the peroxide, I sat there with a pair of tweezers and picked out the pellet pieces - one by one.

Like Callmecrazy here, I got to see the aftermath of that brush with death and ponder the alternative. I've had a couple other close calls and I just chalk them up to dumb luck. I like to joke about "the Reaper", but I really don't believe there's a numerical list he's workin' his way through. At 71, I keep marveling at younger folks dropping out for "natural causes". But I'm not anxious about it. My time will come when it comes.