Now Ya Know

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Why I nicknamed myself Bustednuckles.

I hate those.

When you smack a knuckle with a glove on, it hurts like a bastard, you see blood seeping through the glove and you don’t even want to look.

Yeah, barked the knuckle

Again.

50 thoughts on “Now Ya Know”

  2. Oh yes, I would think all of us know the feeling, another is burn scars from welding. Ya wear gloves and the hot beads still find their way down and up to burn you bad enough to leave a scar.

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  4. I AM STUCK ON BAND-AID BRAND ‘CAUSE BAND-AID STUCK ON ME !!

    That is sort of what my arms end up looking like when cutting huisache, mesquite and other thorny growth in our pasture. We’re cheap and would rathe do the work ourselves but man do we pay in muscle ache and scratches. Just comes with the territory.

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  5. I dropped a floor jack onto my big toe. Hard enough to emboss the leather shoe I was wearing. I stood there swearing, knowing that taking off my shoe would only make the burger and bone that used to my toe hurt more.

    Instead it turned out that my toe survived. Bruised like hell and lost some feeling but man I was sure there was an amputation in the works.

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    • Had a 4800 pound battery dropped on my right foot/big toe from about 4″. Completely crushed the front of my combat boot. Didn’t feel a thing until they jacked it back up, then I screamed from the pain. I now have a permanent hammertoe on my right foot. I never did find out the jackwagon that wheeled it up then hit the drop lever without looking first.
      Got “lucky”, I guess.
      Age 20 at the time. USAF Missile site.

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      • Stoned in gym class in highschool, in the locker room all by myself. All at once the door opened up and someone rolled a little red ball about 4inches around into the locker room underneath the privacy screen. I thought it was just a little rubber ball so I took two long steps and went to kick that fucker to the moon. My toe’s connected, there was a very loud SNAP and the little ball stopped rolling. It was an indoor shotput. Shattered my big toe and broke the two next to it. My big toe swoll up to three times it’s normal size. Doctor can’t do anything except tape them together
        My big toe is still bent over from that one.

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  7. #2 son asked if he could come by and use some tools and stuff to change his O2 sensor; Sure. Ended up participating and since the new POS cars have absolutely no room around anything ended up burned, scraped, and otherwise dinged up and this was just helping.

    To explain, I seem to have an affinity in starting threads when you cannot see them. I call it a ‘braille’ job. Still have to reach down past the hot manifold and the sharp edges to get to where the business is to be done…..Got things started and said, you finish…..

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      • You’ve got that right Phil. I’ve been able to “blind thread” a bolt or nut or whatever holding it backwards over my head without seeing where it’s supposed to go – I call it Braille Mechanics…

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  8. What? You don’t use those gloves that have plastic or rubber ‘armor’ on the backside? I swear by them when I find them in my XXXL size (unusually long and wide hands makes it hard to find gloves for under $40 a pair…)

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  11. After 45 years in the mechanical trades, my hands should look like
    ground beef, but besides a few small scars, they all healed nicely.
    I think the dirt. grease and grime have magical healing powers
    because not one boo-boo ever got infected. I have no fear of
    the Chinee Kung Flu. I have a lot of health issues but I doubt
    there is anything wrong with my immune system. I have had
    so much shit on my hands (literally) that it could drive the maggots
    off a Civil War gut wagon.

    I worked on a pump from an Alpo plant. The pump takes a shit,
    the maintenance mechanics swap it out let it sit for weeks, and
    you could smell it for 3 city blocks when I opened up!

    I set up an A-frame hoist over a shit-pit in the basement of the
    Compton Police Department. I put on a safety harness and
    had a guy lower my ass down to change out a ball float.

    I spent some time at the Terminal Island treatment plant. (AKA
    the Turd Farm.) A buddy (my foreman) called the little brown
    floaters “Snickers Bars.” To this day, I can’t pass a candy
    counter without thinking of Tim!

    I saved the worst for last. Another shit-pit, this time in the basement
    of a Chinee bank in Chinatown. I soloed what would be considered
    a two-man job. In an area almost as small as a phone booth, I yanked
    a long-ass deep well pump. Now I know why most virtual outbreaks
    originate in China. I don’t know what those motherfuckers eat, but
    imagine the smell of a hundred corpses left to rot for a few days
    in the hot sun. It was like that. The icing on the cake was the
    floating used Kotex pads!

    Every time your wife says she had a bad day at work, think of that
    and smile.

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      • Close. I once had to get in the back corner of an excavation for a new house. They hadn’t gotten quite down to grade and I had to smooth it up by hand to get the footings in. I was wondering what that grey-blue gooey muck was that coated everything, boots, shovels, picks, and gloves. Turned out it was the bottom of the former septic tank. And all of this fun-n-games in a freezing November drizzle. I was seventeen, and it was wonderful motivation to keep my grades up and look for something white collar for a career.

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      • Gee, ya’ll probably don’t want me to describe being elbow deep in a bowel resection holding a guy’s gut in and keeping an artery from pulling away and the surgeon mistakes your pinkie for the appendix, clamps it with two large clamps preparatory to suturing it closed just before it excises it… and ya can’t move your hand, all you can do is yell at the stupid SOB that is not the appendix. Or the time a colon cancer patient was having an abscess drained and the surgeon nicks the descending large intestine, the pressure from behind the abscess cause coffee ground like feces to spray all over you and three others nurses and catch the surgeon in the face. I could tell ya stories from the OR and Wards…

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        • HOLD ON!
          Lemme grab a sandwich first….
          That’s some nasty shit buddy.
          I think my personal worst was when I worked at a slaughterhouse they were refurbishing for a while that had a rendering plant right next door over in North Portland.
          In the Summer time.
          That fucker would gag ya a mile before you even got near the place and when the wind was just right it would blow that Liquified Death stench right in your face for hours on end.
          That and the Hog Farms back in Nebraska that you could smell twenty miles before you got within eyesight of them.
          Gag a maggot off a gut wagon.

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          • Oh Phil, I could not top that, I remember that slaughter/rendering plant up there and it would produce a bile upchuck just driving past it in the warm summer… I could not imagine working in it or cleaning it up. Even I have my limits as to what I would do or work at and I am old farm kid that had to deal with dead goats and sheep way back in the pasture that have been dead for a week and ya had to dig a whole right next to it and then roll it over, you made sure you haven’t eaten breakfast or lunch before, cuz’ you would lose it.

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      • I have a place in Wisconsin on the Mississippi that, before my family got it, was a resort. The place had about 10 of the old style septic tanks and they pretty much all had problems.
        One weekend one of the POSs backed up and I had to call the local septic guy. He got there and I explained what was going on. He dug it up, opened the access plate and sticks his damn arm in and starts pulling shit out of the clogged area. When he’d finished it was around lunch time so I told him I’d buy him a burger and beer at a gin mill in town. We got there and he sits down and eats the hamburger without even washing his hands. He got a call and had to go and I went back to my place.
        Later that afternoon , it started raining so I somehow wound up back at the tavern.
        I started talking to a couple of local guys and told them about the septic episode. The one guy listened and asked me “who the hell’d you say that was?” I told him ithe septic guys name was Alf. The other guy said he couldn’t figure who that was and the first guy say, “yeah, you know him. Alf, guy lives up on County C, works with shit everyday and don’t know it.”
        Always remembered that day.

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    • Once upon a time, there was a time, there was a website called “The After Battery Rat”, by Dex Armstrong. He wrote about his days in the early ’60s as a crewman on the USS Requin (SS-481) operating out of Norfolk, VA.
      One of the tasks that could be assigned was diving the sanitary tanks for cleanup while in port.

      He claimed that doing so was a service record entry, so that he would only have to do it once in a career.

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  12. I don’t have any knuckles that aren’t busted. I’m a 30 year aircraft mechanic, Air Force avionics. The J79 engine in an F-4 Phantom has engine gas temperature (EGT) thermocouple sensors every 10” around the burner can. Tech orders prevent engine removal to replace. You’re literally reaching blind to remove the safety wire, remove the high temp connections, remove the sensor and replace it in reverse.

    All being done by feel. No visual possible.

    I feel your pain

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    • I sense a kindred soul who would like nothing better than to watch the light fade away in some asshole design engineers eyes as you slowly tighten your grip around his throat.

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  13. Since I’m on Coumadin (blood thinners) for the rest of my life, I bleed like a stuck pig no matter how minor or shallow the scrape or cut. I’ll have people tell me, “You’re bleeding!!” – and I don’t even know how it happened. I have to be real careful around sharp objects and metal. Easy to bleed out with an INR of 3 plus!

    Old Age ain’t for sissies.

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    • Oh ya! You have to be careful! egorr, do you carry a clotting bandages or solutions with you? I am on a med that while it is not a blood thinner, it does thin out the blood and I have to be careful, same here people have told me you are BLEEDING and not aware of it. Sure stains clothes I can tell ya!

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      • Egorr and Cederq, former lab jerk here. I can’t tell you how many thousands of protimes/INR’s I’ve done–38 years worth. I also seen my share of ugly stuff in trauma ER, but all I had to do was get my syringe in for the specimen and get out of the way. That and stand there with the O-negative until they yell for it.
        I understand the charge that the adrenaline junkies get from the excitement, but I burned out on it, and just don’t need to see that anymore.

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        • Same here Greg, after 22 years of it I was burnt out on too. I was diagnosed with MS at 43 and I decided to end it. I was working on my doctorate on Applied Clinical Research and had just been accepted into a program down at South Western University down in Dallas.

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  15. I sliced across three knuckles with a knife once.

    “We’re going to give you stitches in those three cuts, too.” (the gash across the finger to the bone needed stitches)

    Me: “No you won’t. Then I’ll never learn.”

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  16. As we get older and our epidermis loses collagen it becomes easier and easier to break the skin and get such injuries. It happens so easily and often that hands and forearms are covered with “mystery” injuries because one gets so busy they don’t notice the injury till later when you get blood on something inadvertently…….or the wife tells at you for bleeding on stuff in the house.

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