Thursday, November 08, 2007

They Have Sewn Up My Nose

Idiotic.

So I was in the process of kneeling down in front of a rack to get the dimensions of the button array on an 8 x 8 SDI/AES routing matrix (don't worry, it's Greek to most people) and the lads had left a keyboard-in-a-drawer pulled out and the two little thumbscrews that secure it pulled out farther still and -- I don't know. It came outta nowhere! I was too close. One of the furschlugginger knurled ends of a thumbscrew got caught in my delicate, tiny left nostril and I was off-balance: rriip!

Invoking the name of a Deity while condemning the situation in heartfelt tones, I clutched at my nose and fell gracefully over on my back, just missing the cold, hard steel of the next row of racks. "Help," said I, "unh, help?" Bleeding profusely -- a talent of mine -- I waited for said help and after five minutes of highly-skilled bleeding, help did appear in the form of a concerned member of the Traffic department. I requested some paper toweling.

This arrived in due course, along with responsible authority, who pronounced sentence: "Blood has been spilled. You must go to Occupational Health!"

Ninety minutes, one tetanus shot, three Lidocaine beestings and two stitches later, here I am, telling you. Don't try this at home! Really, don't.

The doc promises there will not be a scar. Better not!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ouch! You poor thing! I hope it doesn't hurt too much.

Roberta X said...

...Not yet...!

Anonymous said...

Sorry to be so chatty, but isn't the word "furschlugginger" from MAD Magazine?

Roberta X said...

...I am not sayin' nuthin'!

Anonymous said...

Nothing shorted?

Is this the face that lunched
a thousand chips?

Roberta X said...

An' toppled th'topless racks of Omneon?*

Nope. Not even a flicker of failure. But I will never look at a rackmount keyboard/monitor drawer in quite the same way.

Those bedarned thumbscrews have been unscrewed from the device. They're a menace to navigation!
____________________________
* (Our video servers are made by Omneon).

Anonymous said...

That's cheating! I didn't know about Omneon. "Iled the top-burned mess of towerdom" was where I would have gone, but I wasn't trading on insider information.


The horror of doing a Jenga to the racks hadn't occurred to me. There's a TV ad for a product better left unadvertised, wherein a librarian has a sudden tummyache and topples a whole library. Of course, that schtick belongs over at the Fallacist's, who's already been accused this morning of being a "radical Librarian."

There's a historical reason they call them "thumbscrews."