He Can Be Taught

Many of us were taught while growing up that if you're carrying a sharp object and you drop it, let it fall. It's great practical advice, you know.

Among the accessories available (I adore alliteration) for the drain snakes I sell are retrieving tools. They are sharp and typically pointed objects. They have to be, so that they may puncture and burrow into a blockage in a drain and retrieve it. 

A year or so back I was carrying not one but two of them into a customer's office. And I dropped both. And I tried to catch them. 

It was like a juggling act which had gone off the rails. There I was trying to corral those two retrievers, each bouncing off my hands one to the other, and each time digging a barb into my palms. "Oh, ah, oh, ow," I repeated many times over trying desperately to grab them. Of course, they ended up hitting the floor anyway.

Why I had two handkerchiefs I don't know (usually only having one) but it was fortunate that day. I had to wrap them around my hands driving home, hoping the bleeding would stop by the time I got there. Tiny puncture wounds take awhile to seal.

The moral of the story, in case you - as I - didn't get the lesson originally: if you drop a sharp object, let it fall.

Electrocuting a young helper.

I had a customer come into my Shop one day for a chuck on the front of his machine. He had a thirteen or fourteen year old kid with him as a helper.

As I gathered my tools and the new chuck I noticed that the cord which should have had a push button on/off switch on the end had nothing but two exposed wires. I said, "I have on/off switches on hand. I could pop one on for you." This was more than a mere upsell, Marty sticking his hand in a  guy's pocket. To start the machine you had to have that push button switch.

"Naw, I don't need it Cosgriff. That's what the kid is for," explained the customer, pointing at the young teen.

Incredulous, I asked, "What do you mean?"

The guy explained, "I have the kid hold the wires and I tell him to touch them together when I want it on. Then I tell him to pull them apart when I want it off."

"You're gonna kill this kid," I quite emphatically replied. "Oh, he'll be all right," I was told.

I went into my office, brought out a switch, and began installing it on the cord of his machine. "I ain't payin' for that, Cosgriff," the idiot tightwad said.

"I ain't asking you to," I barked back at him. And I barked it too. "But I can't let this thing go outta here knowing how you're using it. You're gonna hurt that boy."

I haven't seen him since, and good riddance to bad rubbish. And contrary to the opinion of some, I know I ain't God's gift to humanity. But some things you just have to do simply because they're the right thing to do.

The buried dog

As all friends and relatives would attest, as a rule Grandpa Joe had a less than subtle way of getting his point across. Still, there were times when he could be impressively restrained yet make his point well understood.

He rented arc welders. Some of these weighed 1100 or 1200 pounds, so when they were shipped they had to be loaded by an electric hoist or crane onto the back of a pickup truck or flatbed. They tended to swirl in a gentle circle as they were raised or lowered. Sometimes they would have to be raised several stories, and I had gotten into the bad habit of standing nearly under the machines as they were raised, simply to watch the twirl.

One day as a young teen while out on a job site with Joe, I was doing just that. Without a word he stepped near enough for me to hear. Looking up at the welder too as it rose he asked, "We used to have an old dog that would watch from underneath as we raised a load. You know what we did with him?"

"No, what?" I asked in return, only half listening and still looking up.

"We buried him."

As his point slowly dawned on me, and as he had already walked away, I took several steps from the action myself. Dummy me wasn't thinking that things can fall, and that half-ton things falling a long way can hurt you bad.

Point taken, Joe.