Arrived at a client site to deliver manual handling training to their staff (stonemasons). Told the heating system wasn't working (don't think it had ever worked truth be told) so they plugged in a small portable heater.

End of the day went to switch off the heater and ended up laying flat on my back with smoke rising from the wall socket and a very sore arm for the rest of the night...second time that had happened as well as, while at University, received an electric shock from a computer plugged into the wall that must have had a loose connection. Again, ended up on my back. Hoping there isn't a "third time unlucky!"

As a kid, did some seriously dangerous things...throwing myself of the top of bales of hay that had been stacked high and landing on my neck and shoulder.

Being chased by a farmer with a shotgun for being on said bales and ripping my knee open on barbed wire...still bare the scar but he let us go when he saw the blood pouring from my knee!

"Playing" with bullets that were found at the local aerodrome...i.e. dismantling them!

My neighbour bringing home a LIVE hand grenade which he had been playing football with (subsequently blown up by the army!)

Didn't end all well though...a neighbour ended up with 3rd degree burns all the way down his leg from a canister of what we think now was mustard gas which he found in a local field and was "playing" with. Was in the house at the time and heard him screaming all along the road and until the ambulance arrived.

Reminds me of my schoolboy trips to an old RAF firing range looking for the old tanks buried in the sand dunes but instead finding clips of unused cannon shells. Local bobby was in a state of panic when our mothers made us take them to the nearest police station.

quote=Seabee81]

Haha this has just made me chuckle. Some great posts on here.

Just to add to my earlier response, the RCV was taken to a police vehicle compound where I later examined it in detail with the help of its driver and others. Also in the compound were the remains of a motor bike which had collided head-on with a car and created a massive furrow in the front of the car. The biker and the driver were both killed in the collision which received considerable local and regional media publicity. I remember thinking on seeing the remains that thank goodness my work, unlike that of the police, didn't include having to visit and tell relatives about sudden deaths.

During my investigation I learnt that the RCV compaction mechanism, a "Scapa Garwood" of American design, had apparently gained the dubious nickname of "handcrusher" or similar in the USA. Moreover, I recall that the literature about it included a claim that it was powerful enough to digest a "Mini" car, even though it was highly unlikely that anyone would wish to feed a small car into the mechanism. Perhaps I'm being nasty but it would have been quite satisfying to have been able to truss up the designer of the mechanism and/or the bosses of the firm which made it and then threaten to feed them into it! :-)

Reading all the memories of the good old days above, I had a think through all the jobs I had done. Eventually decided that the most dangerous job was the first one after leaving school - about 16 years old. Lab technician in a place making vaccines for various human diseases. Apart from the childhood ones, DPT, we did smallpox, rabies, botulinus and plague vaccines. All of which involved growing the live bugs in culture media and then harvesting them. A rather smart white cotton lab coat was worn to protect your own clothes. No isolation, no extraction, open labs.

The first lab I worked in had a brass plaque on the wall "in memory of Dr ..... who died in faithful pursuit of his duties" Story was that he was smoking his pipe while pipetting something nasty and put the pipe down in a drop of the nasty. One other doctor managed to inject himself with sleeping sickness instead of the mouse he was holding.

The smallpox was grown on the backs of live sheep. Choice cuts of lamb, legs, shoulders, chops etc., were later distributed to staff

When bitten by a rabid rabbit I sucked the blood off my finger, as one does, put a plaster on it and carried on with the rest of my rabbits.

A few days later while anaesthetising the rabbits (chloroform in a tin can with cotton wool in the bottom) so that the nervous tissue (brains) could be harvested, I fell asleep and had to be slapped awake by the doctor who was waiting for his next rabbit.

I left shortly after recovering from whooping cough (in faithful pursuit of my duties)

Oh happy days ! I met my first girlfriend there. Moira, I remember you well.

Anyone want to know about working in a uranium mine in Niger during the rebellion ? Much safer.

Merv

To avoid any confusion I'd better add that my concluding comment at #48 above was not intended as an incitement of violence - I just relished the thought of being able to alarm the designer and makers of the compaction mechanism involved rather than actually carry out the threat - I'm not that nasty!

Also, Melrose, in your response at #42 you mention your "...neighbour bringing home a LIVE hand grenade which he had been playing football with (subsequently blown up by the army!)" As some of us may have misinterpreted what you wrote, was it the neighbour, the hand grenade or both which were blown up by the army?!! :-)

Sean,

thanks.

Moira dumped me and took the last bus home. She got married, (about the same time as I got married to someone else) had twins and worked in the local bank.

Happy endings

Merv

Great idea Graham :-

Be great to hear the exploits of how Merv got into uranium mining, and how safe it really was!

If however Merv decides to take advantage of his new found fame I would suggest a title for Merv's autobiography could be either "The life and times of Merv the Swerv" or "Merv's Nine Life's".

Must admit to feeling a bit deflated that the split from Moira was normal, I was hoping for something dramatic to have happened to her, for example drinking from the wrong cup at work! She wouldn't have done that again!

Uranium mining

I got the job, Safety Management audit and management training, after completing the same sort of work in France. Actually it was one of my most enjoyable projects; very nice friendly people, an on-site visitor's hotel, decent food and beer in the staff restaurant and bar.

The best part was the training. Especially the management safety audit training. In mining, there are two distinct populations; the actual miners, who go down the mine and the "day" people; Administers, technicians, stores, maintenance workshops and so on. I did two sessions a day, one in daylight, the other at the front. usually I took the "day" people down to the front and the miners went to the "daylight" areas. Now, this was a "wet" mine. Lots of water, lots of deep puddles. The miners took great pleasure in watching the managers struggle through the mud and getting water in their wellies. So did I. (the trick with tunnel-wide puddles is to walk straight down the middle, not at the sides).

The rebellion was actually quite a friendly one. At that time. They were usually content just to nick the odd four-wheel drive from idiot tourists. I had breakfast one day in the hotel with the head of the army and the chief of the rebels. They had been born in the same village, went to school together and remained good friends.

Near-death experience ? During audit training, we were watching two miners stuffing dynamite into the drill holes. The manager next to me started swearing and walked over to remove a small box from off a stack of larger boxes. He explained : "sometimes you get rocks falling from the roof. If one falls on a box of dynamite you get flat dynamite. If it falls on a box of detonators you get a loud bang and some shrapnel. However, if it falls on a box of detonators sitting on top of a box of dynamite, it's goodnight Niamey" Oops.

Not my worst job, in fact one of the better ones.

Keep moving

Merv

There was a social club with a bar at the top of Camden Town station where I would frequent when working split shifts and play snooker. There was also a trainmans' depot based at Camden Town and spare drivers would while away the hours until they got a phone call from the station master that a train was waiting in the platform.

I also recall stories of a trainmans' depot somewhere on the Northern Line where some bright spark had managed to hook up an internal (auto phone) line directly to the pub opposite where spare drivers would while away the hours. Pre mobile phone era of course.

My favourite story is a colleague (train guard) on night shift went to Wembley Park social club to celebrate a retirement. At Finchley Road the driver went to the back of the train to see why the doors had not opened and saw the guard semi-comatosed and asleep. So he opened the doors and closed them and calmly walked back to his cab and drove on to Baker Street. At Baker Street the Area Manager was waiting asked the guard, who had now woken up by now, what was the problem at Finchley Road..."no problem whatsoever Guv'nor".

Ahh, those were the days when the railway ran fluidly.

Forgot to add to this thread my experience of the ‘pigeon house’. This occurred almost 20 years ago when I was shadowing employees involved in pest control/hygiene action work for my local authority employer. The house was owned by a reclusive middle-aged woman who had developed mental problems and took pigeons into the house from an outside aviary where they had previously been kept by her late father. As well as breeding, the pigeons were allowed to roam/fly wherever they wished and over time virtually every flat surface inside the house became coated with pigeon poo. This attracted rats and numerous insects. Doctors and no doubt social workers eventually became involved when the woman also developed physical illnesses (including respiratory problems from inhaling airborne spores and poo dust) and was taken to hospital.

The clearing of the house began with an air rifle cull of the 100+ pigeons because none of them could be persuaded to fly away, understandable because they were so tame and conditioned to living in the house. The woman had also been a hoarder, so the task of bagging the contaminated contents of the house for disposal took a number of days. For my one afternoon at the house (after the pigeons had been removed) I was very glad to be wearing as much PPE as possible (wellies, rubber gloves, disposable overall with hood and elasticated openings plus respirator) partly because of the strong pungent smell and the fact that the rubbish and poo deposits on most of the floors were heaving with insects and maggots. In addition, some of the floorboards had become weak through rot. The electricity supply had been turned off because in some places the old rubber insulation on exposed cables had perished and fallen off to pose a risk of contact with live wires.

The circumstances were very sad and goodness knows what happened to woman. However, ever since, TV documentaries which feature congested infested houses have tended to remind me of the pigeon house. Thankfully, TVs can only convey images and sounds and not smells!

Dear Merv
I loved your contribution #50. I have worked in the same business but not in the good old days. I was so impressed with the story that I have circulated it to my H&S colleagues in various government labs.
Have nice a weekend

Also, Melrose, in your response at #42 you mention your "...neighbour bringing home a LIVE hand grenade which he had been playing football with (subsequently blown up by the army!)" As some of us may have misinterpreted what you wrote, was it the neighbour, the hand grenade or both which were blown up by the army?!! :-)

A "life of Merv" I like the idea.

Some possible chapters :

* Something else I remember was growing kilos of E Coli on open Agar trays then scraping the live stuff off into bottles for someone's research project

* Next job was the water works. (paid twice as much as a medical tech.) Taking daily samples at the bottom of a 25ft shaft (not bothering to tell anyone where I was going) Severe case of chlorine gas poisoning (treated with hot buttered tea) Roaming around the districts in a minivan (taught how to drive it by one of the other drivers) knocking on doors and asking the lady of the house if you could have a sample of her water. Meantime I enrolled as a Student with the Institute of Science Technicians, a SIST. If I had qualified I (I didn't, got married instead) I would have been a MIST, Fellows were FISTs and the President ?

* Paper mill. Saw people being stretchered out almost every week. Including the day production manager (told some one to clear paper off the top of the machine. Operator said no, it was too dangerous. Manager said it wan't and did it himself. It was.) One man who put his arm through two rollers on the size bath. Back to work a month later. Nothing changed. And of course there was the machine foreman who dumped the mill manager in a beater (tank where paper pulp is ground under a heavy toothed roller. Naturally he was fired. (temporarily) Never saw the safety officer. Probably too busy filling out accident forms (if he bothered) and putting up posters.

* Moved, at the insistence of the mother-in-law, to an international chemical firm with a good reputation for safety. Nothing much of interest there, though perhaps handling isocyanates in an open lab ? (weigh it out in a tin can, mix it with the polyols and amines and measure the rise time) Flew around Europe demonstrating techniques and training clients. Got told off by a gendarme at Paris air port for carrying heavy scissors for cutting plastic tubes and sheets in my brief case. He then escorted me through all the crowds and check-in, handed my scissors to the pilot who brought them back as soon as we had landed, and supervised my seating in first class. The client, in Barcelona (I remember I had spent weeks learning Spanish but quickly found that the work force only spoke Catalan) had long ago decided that the water was not safe to drink so he supplied a barrel of red wine in the workshop. Help yourself. He posted my scissors back.

Then I got promoted to HSE manager. And the real fun stuff started.

Any sponsors out there ? Or a publisher willing to offer a million Euros advance ? Film rights ? (Brad Pitt would be about right. Or Johnny Dep)

Keep on moving

Merv

Aye...that would have been at my school (with the mercury!). Also teacher throwing a large lump of potassium into a glass water bath..result - students cowering below benches due to flying glass and water everywhere when the potassium reacted with the water.

Same teacher, bottle of Oleum...tripped while leaving the chemical cupboard. Whole full bottle smashed so oleum everywhere - floor, desk, student bags, students...

Teacher dead now...died of liver failure as also a bit of a drinker who decanted vodka into a plastic bottle then stashed it in the chemical cupboard and labelled as "aqueous solution".

Also had a physics teacher who regularly gave electric shocks to students he didn't like by wiring up their chair in such a way that when they sat down they would get a mild shock...thankfully must have thought I was a nice student as never done that to me!

Ah, those carefree days at school...

I've had quite a number of serious near misses in construction and in my defence these incidents are nearly all over 30 years ago, my wife says I',m poacher turned game keeper.

Learning to drive a dumper as a 16 year old and promply turned it over (that was the first of two rollovers). Almost burried in a 10 foot deep trench on a housing site, no shoring and no sense. Helped my ex brother in law re slate the front of a roof on a 2 storey terraced house fronting on the street, stripping from ridge down and re slating from gutter up without a scaffold.

But I think the most disgusting thing I ever did was when I worked near the local abbatoir one hot summer many years ago and noticed a cows stomach fall off of the offal lorry and as a practical joke sneaked off site and picked it up on a couple of battens and left it on the grub shed table, well I thought it was funny at the time but from the ladds reaction I didn't have the bottle to own up.

As another retrospect regarding the tripe works, if conditions there had been bad, I wonder if my boss at the time would have allowed me to serve an Improvement Notice citing a breach of the Gut Scraping...Welfare Order. In the same vein, I wonder if any inspector ever took action to enforce it between 1920 and its repeal in 1992. The order's initial part says that it wasn't applicable to factories and workshops in which the named processes were "only occasionally carried on". In the apparent absence of any clear definition, perhaps the word "occasionally" was the subject of debate among inspectors. Also I'm curious though not desperate to know what parts 5 & 6 of the order were about: My 1982 vintage copy of "Redgrave's Health and Safety in Factories" simply shows " 5-6 [revoked] " in the order's final part.

Anyhow, mentioning the order's title (along with the Mule Spinning (Health) Special Regulations 1953 and the Wool, Goat-Hair and Camel-Hair Regulations 1905) during occasional lectures to safety groups, etc., invariably caused some mild amusement. Also, mention of the name "Draeger" during talks to police groups would prompt looks of recognition because the firm was (perhaps still is) a major supplier of breathalyser kits to UK police forces in the late 1970s. I explained that HSE inspectors used Draeger detection tubes to 'breathalyse' or roughly test for levels of airborne harmful substances in workplaces.

the 2 worst jobs that i have ever undertaken are listed below;

1. Hydro-Demolition - absolutely awfull especially when doing concrete ceilings getting them ready for repair - pretty much like being rained on by gravel!

2. Artex removal - stubborn as a mule to get off!!

allan

Why is it that almost all the people shown doing yucky jobs on TV documentaries seem to be using protective gloves which extend no further than their wrists? As protective gauntlets alias extended gloves are available, why is it that they don't seem to be used for work where there is a fair likelihood of contamination through the gaps between standard wrist length gloves and the sleeves of protective garments? Is it because they are more expensive, harder to put on/take off, more uncomfortable or a mixture of these or any other reasons?

Also, could the masks and respirators used by people doing work which exposes them to noxious smells incorporate some sort of fragrance system to counter the smells? Perhaps masks and respirators with such systems are available or have been tried in the past and found ineffective. If not, perhaps there's scope for protective equipment firms to develop such systems considering the high number of people exposed to horrible smells during their work.

Also, I guess that at least some of us are intrigued by Clairel's claim at #69 to have visited a manure farm: Surely all farms with animals or birds produce quantities of manure anyway - stuff which can be recycled as garden fertiliser and/or harnessed as bio-fuel, etc.!

p.s. In view of this and earlier responses I'd better add that I don't have any obsession with or particular expertise regarding yucky/smelly work activities - just some OS&H-based curiosity about aspects of such work carried out by many people which most of the population doesn't know about and wouldn't want to know.

Not sure if this has ever actually been anyones profession but gutting rabbits tests the constitution!