Safety Concerns.........or not

I was reading an article recently about tablesaw safety. I do take safety seriously in my shop, but for some reason the article got me to thinking about an experience I had as a kid.

One day when I was 8 years old a totally black kitten followed me home. My brother aptly named it Jinx, and it certainly turned out to be a jinx for him. My mother gave me permission to keep it, but it wasn’t allowed in the house. This wasn’t a big problem because we lived in Culver City Calif. and it doesn’t get very cold there.

I shared a small bedroom with my older brother who was 13 at the time. The day after I got the cat it had placed itself below our bedroom window and seemed to be pleading to get in. My brother thought he could reach it by bending over the window sill, so he lifted the window and unhooked the screen and swung it out. He then leaned out over the sill as far as he could, but he couldn’t quite reach the cat. It was past our bedtime and our mother was reminding us to be quiet and get to bed.

My brother told me he had to get further out to reach the cat and that I would have to hold his legs. I did that but he still wasn’t far enough out, so he kept prompting me to hold on further down on his legs so he could reach farther out. While doing all this my brother was yelling instructions to me and I was laughing a lot.

Meanwhile my mothers patience finally ran out and she yelled out that she was coming in with a stick! By that time I was holding my brother by his ankles which were all the way up to the sill. When my mother said she was on her way in i panicked and let go of my brothers ankles which rapidly disappeared out the window along with his feet.

I quickly hopped into my bed and pulled the covers up. When my mother came in (without a stick) she looked around for a moment and couldn’t see my brother so she checked behind the door and in our little closet, then she looked at me and asked “where in the world is Bill”? Just then the front doorbell rang. My mother went to answer it and lo and behold, it was my brother standing there in his shorts and t-shirt!

I didn’t hear the ensuing conversation in the living room, but when my brother came into the bedroom he said “If I hadn’t known how to land I could have broken my neck! I’m going to kill you!”

Well the thought of getting blamed for my brothers broken neck was disturbing, but I certainly didn’t lose any sleep over the death threat which I had gotten almost every day ever since I could remember.

I guess the moral of the story is, be careful who you hang out with.

-- Mike, American in Norway