Some of y'all have seen my picture on the mower I use in the "face with a name thread", and that one has almost taken me out twice. Once it pinned me against a tree while rolling back when the engine cut off because I took my feet off the operator presence pedals when it started to roll over backwards on a hill. I had one quick chance to yank free as the hydraulics bled down and it rolled ever tighter. All it ended up doing was a bad scrape on my back from the dogwood tree's rough bark. Another time I just tried something stupid when I first bought it. I backed down a bank with no room to run out at the bottom and when I tried to stop it flipped over on me. I pushed as hard on the control handle as I could once my back hit the ground and it gave me time enough to get clear before the whole weight settled on me. My sons were right there and we three righted the beast with it still running and no damage to it, thanks to my softening the initial blow!

I've had a couple of close calls cutting down and trimming trees. The danged things don't always go according to my idea of physics and wood is really heavy! One time I was hanging on a rope suspended down about 30 feet from the closest overhead limb to cut a lower limb that was too close to a house. I under cut it and had a rope on the limb to swing it away from the house. I made a hinge cut from one side to let is swing sideways rather than fall straight down. It was rotten in the center and gave way too soon, swinging the butt up into my chest and shoving me hard. I went around the tree twice in one direction and the limb circled in the opposite direction. I had to lift my legs to clear it each time and pushed it off me to untangle the lines. I was lucky to have been hanging from such a high limb because it gave me lots of room to swing.

About 2 years ago I fell out of the top of a pine I was taking about 10 feet off of. A large bird, a hawk I think took offence and hit me from behind. Fortunately I was not taking the entire tree down because I would have taken the side limbs all off on the way up. As it was I fell from limb to limb and landed in my trailer with hardly a scratch.

That danged cold coffee almost took me out another time.

Not attacking, just flying low level. Slow aircraft that don't move much (gliders, ultralights, hovering helicopters, etc.) can be very difficult to pick up visually against a cluttered background.

Ah yes, the "baked potato wrapper." I remember that well from my days as a volunteer firefighter. Thankfully I never had to deploy mine.

My one close call as a firefighter came when we responded with our engine to a very large brush fire. We were on the freeway, just kind of watching what the fire was doing. Then I started hearing the warnings on the radio for us to get out of there, as the fire was approaching fast. Next thing I know, the fire jumps the freeway right where our engine is parked, and I felt a huge wave of heat blow over me. Thankfully our driver hit the gas and we got out of there very quickly.

You should tell that story you told us once in ArmA.

That was a great story.

Your life was not always so average.

Another one from my Navy days. Shortly after I checked on to the Reagan, somebody higher up decided it would be a good idea for all these new, wet behind the ears Electricians fresh out of school to get some real-world experience fixing shipboard equipment. The Reagan was still in the yards at the time, and Newport News owned most of our gear, so weren't allowed to touch it.

USS Ashland (LSD-448) was due to deploy in a few months in support of the then- new Operation Enduring Freedom, and was horribly behind schedule for upgrades and overhaul at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. So, a group of us junior third class Electricians, fresh out of the nuclear power pipeline, were sent over to be extra bodies to try and get the ship ready on time.

To say that Ashland was a mess would be and understatement- most of their E Div had no idea what their jobs were or how to go about doing them, and I've thanked my lucky stars that I was never on a ship that had to pull in to Portsmouth for work. The folks working over there made even the dullest rocks at Newport News look like rocket scientists.

So one way I was on the fantail with a couple of buddies of mine on a smoke break, and about fifteen minutes after we finish our cigarettes and head back down to the engine room, we hear this tremendous crash literally shake the entire ship. Come to find out a shipyard crane had literally crashed down on the forward part of the flight deck, not too far away from where we'd been smoking just a few minutes earlier. Needless to say we were all too happy to leave that godforsaken ship and get back to the Reagan.

Nope, the electricity story is all I got.....


Wheels

I know a guy who had a close call, F-16D vs glider in Germany. He's lucky, glider pilot wasn't.

A supervisor where I worked was drinking coffee late one night shift.

He wasn't really a bad chap, but he'd upset one of my colleagues earlier in the shift. This workmate was slightly dodgy but worked harder than anyone else and took care to do his job properly. Not impressed with the rebuke.

By way of revenge, he took the supervisor's personal coffee mug into the toilets and worked up a shot of man juice.

Gotta be careful drinking coffee.

Personally, I've had a couple of near misses with angle grinders. There must be some good grinder stories out there...

When I was a lowly conscript in the Royal Danish Navy I was posted on - among other vessels - a small cutter plying the entrance to the Baltic Sea, part of Danish waters.

This was the class of cutter, mine was Y303 "Samsų":
http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:RDN_Y308_Roemoe.jpg

One day, as we entered port, the captain asked me to take the front position on the cutter. It would be my job to throw the front rope onto the bollard on the pier.

That day the captain decided to let the new 2nd-in-command try the docking maneuver. Well, I did my job well and my rope landed just on the bollard when I was asked to throw it. However, the 2nd-in-command didn't quite get the inertia of the cutter right, so suddenly there was way too much pull on the rope I had just thrown on the bollard.

It was a big fat hemp rope of maybe 5 cm. diameter (~2 inches) but it started giving away. I just had time to duck before it broke and the end came whipping closely over my head. I didn't actually see anything, just heard the rope rip, but I found myself showered in small hemp fragments in the seconds afterwards.

The Cap't later told me it had flown right over my head and that I would have been dead if it had hit me in the face. I had no recriminations towards the 2nd-in-command and he wasn't chewed out by the captain afterwards, it was just one of those things that happen when you do something for the first time. I think what happened was lesson enough for him...

The class of ship (in Danish):
http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bars%C3%B8-klassen

Again back in my bricklayer days, I used to catch a lot of flak for what were called "holey" pants. Meaning a pair of pants full of holes. At the time I would literally wear a pair of jeans until they fell off of me. I wore the same pair every day during the work week and they would have holes in the knees and thighs and elsewhere, plus a pound or two of sweat stains. I'd take them off when I got home in the afternoon and they pretty much stood by themselves in the corner.

Anyways, this one day we were working at the top of a scaffold, maybe 25 feet or so up. The laborers hadn't done a good job of securing one of the planks we walked on, and when I stepped on it, it tipped and I started a journey towards the floor below. Then, out of nowhere, I stopped, like something was holding me up.

Well, something was holding me up. A carriage bolt sticking out of the wall had snagged in one of those holes in my jeans and just held me there. I grabbed onto something and hauled myself back up, breathing a little hard.

But those "holey" jeans saved me from serious injury or death that day. So the flak I took for wearing them meant even less than it had before.