Cheese grater
When I was 14, I had a work experience job at the local Italian restaurant. They stuffed me in the kitchen and made me do all the grunt work, like sweeping up or prepping food. The worst task was gutting squids for calamari.

One day they had me at work grinding down blocks of parmesan cheese with a cheese grater. This was some kind of industrial cheese grater; I tried doing a GIS for it but no such luck. Anyway, this was a big machine that stood on the floor and was as tall as me. You put the cheese in a chute, and then you press it down using a lever, where it is pressed against a spinning serrated plate that would grate the cheese and allow fine particles to pass through. Got it? All you really need to understand is that this serrated blade spins very fast and grinds up anything.

I was finished a block of cheese and just the rind was left, so it wasn't being grated. So I...reached inside. My nail chipped against the serrated blade and I pulled it out easily. Chipped nail, no problem at all.

So I got braver. I touched the spinning blade again, and this time it caught hold of my fingertip. It trapped my finger between the spinning plate and the edge of the chute, and really cut in. I yanked it out and they bandaged my finger heavily.

For the next few months I had to have it bandaged, and I also had to always have that finger pointing up or it would start to feel strange. It helped me out during a football match when I was playing defence during a corner kick. I was standing on the goal line when the ball got past the goalkeeper. It was going to go in over my head, but I deftly moved my hand, blocking it with the bandaged hand. The other team was pissed but the ref didn't give us any penalty because he considered it accidental contact.

To this day, 13 years later, I still can see the marks of the blade on my index fingerprint, and whenever I go swimming I can still feel discomfort in my fingertip. Also, typing kind of sucks.
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Thu 20 Dec 2007, 16:04, Reply)