Embarrassing Ways To Lose Fingers

Today was a ‘Safety Stand Down’ day at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. It is a day during which all of us are supposed to pause from our daily work tasks and reflect on our own behaviors toward safety with the understanding that all actions can incur risk, from the important decisions involving others to the tiniest and most innocuous seeming ones involving only ourselves.

One of the events I attended during this stand down was an engineering branch safety meeting. Normally during these monthly safety meetings (my MSFC friends are groaning already) we stomach an impersonal canned slideshow covering topics from road rage to chemical storage to proper stretching before reaching into those treacherous filing cabinets. This format was (thankfully) different – everyone sat together in a room and shared personal stories of accidents, foolish stunts, and lessons learned the hard way (some more hilarious than others). As a group, we gleaned the lessons that should be taken away from these experiences to try to find a way to incorporate this information and re-train ourselves to think more practically and cautiously.

And all the while I was thinking of the lesson I’d learned just the day before...

It started, as most disasters do, with chocolate. And in this I can blame one of my officemates who for this purpose I will refer to as LAM. LAM has a habit of stocking on her desk the most wonderful dark chocolate stash known to mankind. Ok, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but when you’ve had a week as bad as mine, all chocolate develops a touch of mystical enchantment. In fact, had it not been for the ethereal glow above the bowl and the angel chorus singing Barry White, I might have walked right past her door and my day, and finger, would have ended without misery.

But I didn’t, and it did.

I grabbed that delicious piece of dark chocolate from LAM’s bowl and by the time I got back to my desk I realized that I’d smeared a big brown streak of it right across my front pant leg. And this is especially aggravating considering I only have the one pair of khakis left that fit me (also partially because of LAM’s delicious bowl of chocolate). So for the next several minutes my other officemate, Mama J, got to hear a variety of cursing from me that I wouldn’t normally use in the office while fighting with the chocolate napalm stain. The dear heart had a plastic tub of sanitizing hand wipes which we were both hoping might work without leaving my leg a wet, soppy, chocolaty mess... which it almost did. Now my stain looked less like a chocolate smear and more like spilled make-up.

Yes, baby wipes are evil.

Now onto the hand wipes. *this would be a good place to cue the evil music*

This container was similar to most any tub of baby wipes that you might have seen – the cylinder with a cap and a star shaped slit in the top from which you pull the sheets individually. Well, not wanting to be unkind and leave one of the wipes half hanging out to get dried out, I did what anyone would do and what I have done probably a dozen times with baby wipes. I take my finger and shove the sheet back into the canister.

But, as I learned, this was not your average canister and it certainly wasn’t for babies. Whereas the star slit in baby wipes is a weak, flimsy sheet of plastic, this one was an industrial strength sheet that I’m surprised my finger went through in the first place. And when I realized how insanely tight it was and tried to pull my finger back out, those star shaped wedges of thick plastic became barbs holding my finger in and giving me the choice of continue to let the circulation be cut off and endure that pain, or pull at my finger and say Adios, skin.

By now Mama J is listening to an ever more inventive string of cussing from me as the pain is getting worse and my finger is turning a not unattractive shade of purple. On one hand I’m angry because I never dreamed that something that simple could hurt so badly, but second to the pain is the thought that there is NO WAY in hell that I’m going to have to go to the medical center on site to have them cut this monster off my finger and end up on a slide in one of our safety presentations.

And this is where my own personal safety lesson comes into play. As I sat there trying to wedge pens, bottle caps, paper clips, ANYTHING that would get the teeth of that star slit to let go of my poor tormented finger, I was struck with the thought of how I wished that I hadn’t left my pocket knife at Steven’s house. It wasn’t until later that I realized how LUCKY I was that I’d left my knife at Steven’s house because, in my blinded-by-pain state, I actually thought that it would have been a GOOD idea to take a knife to wedge between my finger and the plastic using I don’t know what as leverage. A vein, maybe?

Since all stories should have a happy ending, yes, I did finally get the evil hand wipe lid off my finger before the actual rot set in but yes, it does still actually hurt. So my safety lesson to share for this day is a combination lesson. On the high road, be aware of how pain clouds your judgment – you might be in trouble, but getting out of it quickly can get you into MORE trouble. On the low road, your mother was right. If you stick your finger into puckered holes, you really might not get it back...

Novel Excerpt - "Of War and Taters"

This excerpt is from my second novel, "Of War and Taters." It is a satire for young adults or the young at heart. Think of this town as Mayberry with a little bit of South Park thrown in for giggles. In this scene, Isabelle - Sheriff Stanley's slightly homicidal wife - is extending her reign of terror over the stray that wandered into her yard that morning.  

Not terribly far across town was a dog that was having second thoughts, or would be, if dogs could have second thoughts. They would have been big ones, too. Just this morning he’d been the king of his domain; he knew where the best trash could be found, he knew he could find cold water at the fountain in the park anytime he was thirsty, and he had the whole world to play in if he wanted it. All of that withstanding, it was a very good thing dogs have such a short memory because now Mr. Cuddle Face’s only concern in the world was with getting his new blue collar off before someone saw him wearing rhinestones.

“Oh, look at oo, Mr. Cuddle Face! What did ums do?” A new concern was firmly etched into the animal’s short term memory as the big loud face showed up again with, he was certain, some new horror for him. As it was, he’d managed to slip his back paw up underneath the collar and was now struggling to both extract his paw and push off his collar at the same time while rotating on his free legs. The result was something that resembled a dog losing a ferret fight on top of a tripod.

Isabelle leaned over the pup, pulled his paw from the offending collar and brought him up nose to nose with her. This, small dog owners everywhere should know, is far more terrifying for the average dog than one would imagine. Another positive deficiency here for Mr. Cuddle Face is the fact that he could not see color; if he could he’d have been rather more alarmed by the bright red lipstick puckered up at the end of his snout which matched the curly mass of red hair that kept tickling his ears.

Already today he’d been tossed into a bathtub and scrubbed no less than three times with a tropical bubble bath despite his howls and hopeless growls. The end product was that he now smelled less like a sewer and more like a trash bin behind a daiquiri bar. It was a marked improvement as far as Isabelle was concerned, but the only response it provoked from the dog was that his tail now smelled far more interesting than it used to when he chased it. After the baths he had been left in the bathroom floor a wet soppy mess while she ran out to find him the perfect leash and collar. On her return, Isabelle also had the unkind idea to use the blow-dryer and a comb to hurry things along in the drying department. That caused no small amount of uncustomary fluffiness to his coat. Then, as if the humiliation hadn’t been laid on thickly enough already, he’d been paraded around the street at the end of his shiny new leash and collar. He’d spent the entire time being mostly dragged as he was too busy gnawing at the leash attached to him to pay attention to unfamiliar commands like stay, heel, and don’t poo there.

Isabelle carried the cowed creature with her into the kitchen where she’d begun preparing Stanley’s dinner. She couldn’t stand meatloaf, but she knew he was expecting to come home and find his traditional Tuesday meatloaf with his favorite dish of green bean casserole next to it. She set Mr. Cuddle Face down in the corner of the kitchen nearest the door where she’d already placed his food dishes. Fortunately for him, the speed with which Isabelle had managed to get personalized dishes with his new name on them was a miracle that was lost to Mr. Cuddle Face. At any rate, he was certainly not grateful for the brown lumps of high fiber diet dog food he found therein. He turned his nose up at the dishes and sauntered over to her side at the stove where he could smell the signs of some certainly non-high fiber activity going on. He affected his best hungry puppy whine to get her attention.

“No, Mr. Cuddle Face, this is people food. You go back over to your bowl and eat your yummy beef and gravy.”  His look as he walked back to the bowl said that he was certainly not willing to concede that the gray gelatinous matter in the bowl was indeed gravy.

“That’s a good baby boy, yes you are!” Isabelle turned back to the meatloaf which she was heavily salting, as was her habit. A second look at the white canister she’d been shaking liberally over the meatloaf had a picture of a smiling puppy, which she didn’t remember seeing on the salt shaker before. She turned it over in her hands and read the words “Mr. Scratchy’s Flea Powder, For Contented Canines!” Another turn revealed a skull and cross bones design indicating that it should under no circumstances be consumed. A small smile danced across her lips.

“Silly me! I must have set it right next to the salt and didn’t realize it.” She accidentally knocked a little more into the mixture with a minor exclamation of “Oops!” and set the flea powder down and picked up the similar salt canister next to it. “Well, Mr. Cuddle Face, I’ll bet if we put enough salt in here he’ll never notice it. You won’t tell on me, will you sweetums?” Her smile swirled with a mixture of innocent sweetness and slightly homicidal intent as she hummed happily to herself.

Somewhere in the vicinity of her feet Mr. Cuddle Face was busy expressing his feelings about the beef lumps and gravy paste in his bowl by piddling on the kitchen rug.