I could write a book titled "How To Suffer Dumb Injuries at Walmart".
I could count the ways, but I'll just give a couple of recent examples, at my own expense, instead.
Working in the back room, I need to get some large-sized packing boxes down from a top-steel rack in order to stock them on the sales floor. Instead of using the electric pallet jack to bring down the pallet of merchandise on which the still-folded boxes are included, I ask the back-room supervisor, who's already up on a tall ladder near that pallet, to please hand down some of the boxes I need.
Well, he does it, from still up on high, and I reach up from the ground to grab them. They come down, pretty hard and fast, but sideways, so the edges are what I'll grab, if I can. Ouch, I can't, because on the way down, the boxes give the two middle fingers of my right hand the worst paper cuts, essentially, that I've ever had, neatly but badly slicing both open. Now, who would've thought of that happening? I go around shaking my hand in the air for the next few minutes and have band-aids on both fingers for the rest of the week.
Two weeks ago, I was working overnight, out in the Garden Center storage bins as part of a special-projects inventory crew, storing and recording pallets full of back-to-school merchandise that has been delivered but wasn't scheduled to be put out on the sales floor yet. Rather than down-stack pallets from the trucks and have to move all the merchandise onto other, waiting and empty pallets again, a couple of us just were switching out the empty pallets for the full ones, and taking the empties to the loading-dock ramp. Which was fine, except that the merchandise being brought in still needs to be recorded and binned according to standard operating procedures, which involves actually knowing exactly what items, and how much of each item, is on a pallet, and inputting that information into the inventory-management system. Because the pallets of really heavy back-to-school merchandise (mostly boxes and boxes of wide-ruled and college-ruled filler paper) are being stored on the lowest, ground levels in the bins, they're going under the steel-gondola racks that make up the next level of shelving, and the space is almost completely taken up.
Well, I've still got to get correct counts for everything, and we've already put the pallets under there, and the guy with the manual pallet jack has gone off elsewhere to move something else. So, I'm pretty small and manage to wedge myself between the pallets in two side-by-side bin areas and take a look back so I can get the stuff in the farthest reaches of each bin accounted for and recorded. But then, I've still got to work the top couple rows of the stacks, which are nearly to the top of the next shelf, but not quite. So I push back out of the bins to try to find a better position for seeing and counting the upper stuff and the boxes in the middle of the pallet. Anyway, I decide to try to go in again, this time over the tops of the pallets, so that I'm kind of lying between the top deck of the paper stacks and the steel shelving right above me.
The only problem is that, after a while, as I'm twisting and turning in there as needed in order to see/count better, I catch my shoulder in between the top of the merchandise and the gondola steel, and the shelving, of course, won't give, so I'm wedged in tightly over the pallet of stuff, and, while I could turn a little before, I find that, for some reason, I can't now, and I'm no longer kind of stuck, but really stuck.
And I need to breathe.
I do so, trying to take in big gulp of air. Well, again, of course, the steel won't give, and I can feel my chest pressing against the pallet of paper but unable to expand/move enough for an actually good breath, and now I'm getting a little scared because I feel my heart sort of half-beat, or something -- I don't know, it was just the strangest thing I've ever felt in my chest -- and I realize, OK, I've got to got myself out of here, all the while wondering if I've just given myself a mild heart attack, or something.
Luckily, I was able to gently back out once I held my breath for a moment and turned my shoulder slightly, and I was much relieved that I seemed to be OK. But my chest bone, up high near the collarbone and along the front and even around the back near the underarm on the left side was hurt and felt strained for about 10 days until it finally began to feel better a few days ago. That pulse beat while I was wedged in there was one of the oddest sensations I've ever felt, though, and I'll never try that hard to work such tightly packed bins again.
I have had a few undesirable results with sharpened pencils in my middle-school days. One day, a good friend of mine thought he was tough and was hanging backwards on the small parallel bars. He told me to sit on his back to see if he could hold me up. Unfortunately for him, I had my pencil in my back pocket as you described, and stabbed him. It was only a flesh wound. Not long after, another friend and I were sort of play fighting in art class, and he raised his pencil Psycho-style and jabbed. Genius that I am, I went for the block, even though he wasn't actually planning to stab me. Took it right in the wrist, and the lead broke off, though not too deep. To this day, some 30 years later, I still have a black mark from the lead on my wrist. They sent me to the office, where they called my dad, concerned about lead poisoning. But my dad told them they were idiots, since pencils haven't contained lead since the 16th century.
