I got a call from Bill the other day that was a little surprising and not surprising like "I'm moving to New York City and never talking to you again" surprising, but more like "I cannot believe you did that surprising". I've been there. I ought to know the difference. I've been on the latter end of that conversation before.
Bill asked, "Hey, remember when you had your accident with the hedge trimmer?"
Do I remember? How could I forget that? For those that don't know. I almost cut off my finger with an electric hedge trimmer in the most humanly stupid way possible. Well, I suppose that the stupidest way that I could have done it would have been to turn on the hedge trimmer, stare at it and put my finger in it. What I did was not really as stupid as THAT, but it ranks up there.
One hot summer day, I am cutting my stupid hedges, which I call that because I really, really hated those hedges. They were a blight on my nice house and after almost cutting off my finger; the luster wore off even more. The hedges were on the left side of my yard and were obviously put there to shield my nice yard from the blight that was my next door neighbor's yard. His yard was more of a collection of small shrubs, crab grass, field grass, bare patches of dirt, an above ground pool, a shed, a hot tub, a dog kennel in a cage complete with a dog house, a dog that barked a lot... Did I mention weeds and patches of dirt? While the hedges did indeed shield my precious eyes from the blight next door, I really hated cutting those hedges... a lot. I hated cutting them so much that I put it off until the branches were practically falling over from the top. When I trimmed the top, I pulled 4 foot long branches off every time.
What really sucked about the hedges is that they were grown very close to the neighbor's fence. When trimmed, there was just enough space to squeeze my 22-inch cutting path lawn mower between the fence and the hedge to mow the grass that had grown high. Before this could happen, I had to cut a path between the hedge and the fence. Seeing as how the fence was so close to the hedge, I had to cut a path like one would cut a path in the jungle with a machete. Unfortunately, I didn't have a machete. Well, maybe that was fortunate.
So with a rusty hedge trimmer, no gloves, and shorts on, I started to cut a path down the side of the hedge by the fence. Using a nifty arching motion with my right arm, I swung the trimmer up in the arm, over the branches above me and down by my side again. With my left hand, I pulled the cut branches down. It was a nice system of swing, cut, pull, swing, cut, pull when BUZT, I stopped after cutting because I hit the cord that was powering the trimmer, nicking it, but not quite cutting through to the wires.
I should have been thinking something else that could have happened, something that happened not ten seconds later.
I started again with my swing, cut, pull (I’m getting tired of this, so I move faster), swing, cut, pull, swing, cut, pu... BZZT! There was that sound again. I look down to see what happened. I'm staring down at my left hand. My index finger has been cut... deep. My skin that was around the top of my finger now look like I've cut the top of my finger and started peeling it like a banana.
I yelp, "Ow." I stare at my wound for another second. Now blood is starting to rapidly emerge from my wound.
"Oh no. Oh no. Oh God. Oh crap!"
I am cursing myself for doing this. In vain, I shake my hand, which causes a pain tremor to shoot down my arm. I head for the sliding glass door that will take me back inside. In my haste to get back inside, I realize that the hedge trimmer is still running. I can hear it on the other side of the hedge. I start to run toward the hedge trimmer, but decide to just pull the plug.
I run inside and yell, "Take me to hospital!" I'm holding my hand.
Laura looks at me like "Yeah right."
"I'm not kidding!!!" I yell.
She took me to hospital and I endured a nice set of stitches and pain for a few weeks followed by humiliation and finger numbness...
But this story is not about me...
So Bill calls me and asks me if I remember my accident with the hedge trimmer.
I answer that yes I did.
He says, “Well, I may have just topped you today. I just got back from the hospital”
So what happened was that Bill was splitting boards with a table saw. He was pushing boards through a table saw for some unknown project that he’s been planning around the house.
Bill was originally supposed to come over to visit me by the way. We had it all planned out that Bill would come over to visit with his kids so that Julia could play with her cousin, Bill’s daughter, Tess.
The day before, Bill calls and cancels. He said that Sawyer, his son, had come down with a cold. I could understand that.
So Bill gets to work splitting boards. I need to mention that Bill is downstairs in his non-finished, dank basement doing this. He’s wearing work gloves, goggles and a dust mask.
Bill was guiding the board through the saw blade when (I’m assuming) ZING! He lops off the side of his left hand by the nail. It cuts clean through his thumb, shearing off the far right side of his right thumb. Did I mention that he cut through the bone? Oh yeah, Bill cut through the bone on his right hand. He really upped the ante on that feat. Not only did I not cut through my finger bone (I just cracked it), I also managed to retain my skin. Beaten on both accounts.
In shop class, we were taught that if you ever use a table saw that you should always use something to push the boards through past the blade. The one thing you should never do is to guide the boards through with your bare hands, well that’s exactly what Bill did. When I mentioned this to Bill later by asking, ‘You know you’re supposed to use a guide when using a table saw right?’, Bill got defensive and claimed that when he usually does something like that, he notices that he needs a guide and uses one. This time, he noticed at the same time as the accident.
Now Bill reacted much in the same way that I would have reacted. He noticed that he had cut off part of his thumb and he raced upstairs and screamed, “HELP ME!” to his wife, who I’m told not only did believe his cry for help and not think that he was kidding, but she helped stripped Bill of his mask, goggles and gloves before racing to find a baby sitter from a neighbor nearby.
So long story short, Bill goes the hospital, they spray it off, clean it up, x-ray it, and send him home with some kick ass medication.
The next day, I had to think of a joke. Whenever someone in our family gets injured, we of course tend to the injured, but when it’s apparent that they are okay, it’s open season. When I injured my foot one summer, my older brothers called me “Crip” because I had to hop around the house until my foot healed. After I injured my index finger and had it in a splint for several weeks, I heard a lot of “Don’t flip me off” jokes from co-workers and family alike.
I sought out the perfect joke for this incident, one that would be kind of subtle, yet obvious enough to be slightly mean, but still funny. I did a search for “Slang: Thumb”.
I had my joke, so I just had to call Bill. On my way home from work, I asked Bill how his day was going. He had taken the day off from work because of the pain and was seeing doctors on what to do about the thumb. He might need a skin graft or they might just let it heal over.
“Any diagnosis on how much time it’ll take to heal?” I asked.
“They didn’t really say,” Bill said.
“Well, as a rule of thumb, it takes a few weeks for this type of injury to heal.”
I wait. Bill kind of grumbles.
“Hmm… Is that supposed to be FUNNY?” Bill intones in a slightly annoyed voice.
I laugh.
“I couldn’t help it. I just had to come up with a joke.”
“Well it’s not really funny yet. I’m in pain!” Bill exclaimed.
I get off the phone with Bill and I just have to call people and try the joke out on them. Perhaps I just need to try it out on people that have all of the fingers, have no pain or both. So I scan down in my phone book on my cell phone and dial the first name I scroll across, my brother Joe. He’s not at his office, so I call home. He’s not home, so I talk to my sister-in-law, Jackie.
I ask her if she had heard about Bill’s accident. She hadn’t, so I gladly and helpfully fill her in on the details. I then proceed to tell the joke how I told Bill.
Her response?
“Oh, you’re terrible!” she exclaimed while laughing.
She mentions that Joe is out of town at a conference. So I call Joe on his cell phone. He happens to be in his hotel room at the time. I tell him about Bill’s accident and my subsequent joke.
His response? Laughter and chuckling.
On a roll, I call my Mom and my brother, Paul. Both found the joke funny. So it wasn’t the joke, it was the context of it that Bill couldn’t appreciate. I guess he had to have a little distance from the joke, like not be the one involved…
Now that isn’t exactly the end of the story. While I was off calling other people and telling them the joke, Joe happened to receive a call from Bill a short while after I had called him with the joke.
Bill called to ask Joe what we wanted to give Mom and Dad for Christmas. During the start of this conversation, Bill did not mention his accident to Joe, which was surprising to him. Bill suggested some things that Mom or Dad might be interested in. Joe wasn’t sure on what we should give them.
“I don’t know,” Joe said. “I’m all thumbs when it comes to giving gifts.”
Bill yells, “Did you talk to Bob??!”
Joe laughs explains that he had just talked to me a while before that.
I talk to Bill later and he’s a little peeved at being thumbed at for the sake of a few jokes.
“So you and Joe were just laughing it up at my expense, huh?” Bill asks.
“Sorry. I thought the joke was funny and needed to be repeated.”
“It’s not funny.”
“Oh come on!” I said. “It’s not like I’ve never gotten shit for doing similar things. I got lots of crap when I almost cut off my finger with the hedge trimmer. And don’t you remember when Joe almost broke my foot and I had to hop around for a few weeks? I kept getting this from Joe and Paul, ‘Move it, crip’”
“Yeah…”
“So just have a little sense of humor about it.”
“Well at least you still have you whole finger left. It’s not funny because I lost part of mine.” Bill retorted.
I thought about that and dismissed it. If anything, in our family, that makes it a lot funnier. Now if he had cut off his whole hand, now that wouldn’t be funny… for while. We’d probably have a moratorium on that one until he was free from pain, fitted with a prosthetic and could use it functionally. After that, the Captain Hook references would undoubtedly commence at some point.
