That damned things gonna kill me....

As I read this post by Acidman I couldn't help but think back to when I was working as a wrench monkey in a muffler shop shortly after graduating from high school. Every couple of months somebody would inadvertently drop a muffler and sever the air-hose we'd use to power the air-wrenches.

When the muffler would drop and cut the hose it would whip around, as Acidman said, "like it had a mind of it’s own". To the unsuspecting victim you might not think a rubber hose whipping around would be too bad; well that's until you put eighty pounds of air-pressure behind it. Then when the end of that hose makes contact it'll leave a whelp that won’t go down for days.

We'd hired a new guy, we'll call him George, and George had been there long enough to get smacked a couple of times by the hose so he should have learned from his mistakes. Well evidently it took a damn big mistake, which may have ruined his chances at ever reproducing, to finally teach him a lesson. See George was cutting the muffler off a car as usual, except one minor detail, he was straddling the hose.

When the muffler dropped it was like watch a slow-motion scene on T.V. as it fell and hit the tip of the air-hose releasing that whipping demon; a whipping demon that was trapped and had reared up betwixt Georges legs poping him at least twice in the nads before he hit the ground in the fetal position. As we scrambled to snatch the hose from the wall that damned hose popped George in the chest and head at least half a dozen times and left him looking like he'd gone a couple of rounds with Mike Tyson. Poor rascal wasn't sure what had gotten a hold of him.

Bad part was ole George never did learn his lesson and was constantly getting beaten by that air-hose, he just didn't straddle it anymore. The good part was I'm pretty sure Darwin came in and helped remove him, however unwittingly, from the gene pool.