The year was 1987. I was a 20 year old college student off for the summer. I needed a summer job to stock up on party money for my next year at the great Western Illinois University. I was no longer playing football, so I didn’t have to go back early to make the start of practice, so I wanted to make as much cash as possible. I saw an ad for a place a few blocks away from my house that I could bike too. It was a Monday through Thursday gig working 10hrs a day, and having Fridays as voluntary (not really) 8 hr OT days. The pay was 12$ hr which was good for a college kid back then. The job itself was a very crappy gig working in a non air conditioned factory for a company called Lovejoy
http://www.lovejoy-inc.com/
They make coupling parts for engines. The factory itself was a hugh hotbox where 10 hrs was like 6 hrs in a sauna. The lunch room was air conditioned, and had a pool table, so that was kinda cool. I worked in the wash tank area. My job was to take the parts that they created, and clean off the metal shavings and rust proof them. I had to take each part, put it onto a large rack, and the hydraulic lift would then take the rack and run it through a series of large (1500 gallon) wash tanks. The first one was hot soapy water, the second hot water to rinse, the third to rust proof the part, and the last one to darken/stain the parts. Why they needed to be stained, I have no idea. The whole process took about an hour after I loaded them onto the rack, and was automated.
Ever once and awhile a part would fall off the rack, and sit at the bottom of one of the wash tanks. When this happened we had a 10lb magnet attached to a long pole, and would need to “fish out” the part from the bottom of the tank. The tanks themselves were surrounded by a retaining wall that was about a foot tall, and about 6 inches wide. They needed theses because the tanks can over flow.
One day I was working at my station, and everything seemed to be going wrong at once. First the hydraulic lift wasn’t working correctly, the wash tanks had over flowed, and a couple of parts had fallen into the bottom of the first tank. So the maintence guy was working on the lift, and I went to fish out the parts. As I was standing in the overflow water from one of the tanks fishing out the part, the cable (50K volts) was sitting on a 55 gallon drum next to the wash tanks. Of course the line is turned off, so it’s no big deal, but looking at the exposed wiring made me a little nervous. Some one had come by and set down a metal pan on the drum with the cable resting on it, and the cable jostled loose, and fell towards me and the water I was standing it. It hit the 6 inch wide retaining wall, made a loud crackle, and sparks flew. It then shot out ward towards the way it fell from, and hit the side of the 55 gallon drum creating a bigger crackle, and more sparks. It then fell to the ground. It all happened so fast that I didn’t have anytime to react, and was just dumbfounded. The [censored] moron maintence guy had never shut the power off.
I ended up going into the management offices, and screaming up a storm. They acted concerned at first, but never did anything to the guy, and I never even got a “sorry” from the guy. I did make some good cash that summer, but I also almost didn’t live long enough to enjoy it.
So, post your near death experiences, and I don’t mean, “ I almost got caught bluffing at the river”, or any other crap…..