I tried to break my wrist the other day.  I was changing the brake pads on Charlie's Grand Prix and was using a 24-oz.  mini-sledge to tap the lug wrench in order to break the lug nuts free.  That in itself is not an unsafe practice, but the position I was in and the angle I had to use had me holding the lugwrench in place with my left hand and swinging the hammer across my arm to hit the wrench to the left of my left hand.  That was the unsafe procedure.  I should have held the wrench at the end of the handle and hit it between my hand and the lug nut.  Well, I didn't hit the wrench clean, the hammer slipped off and the  handle came down across my left arm just above the wrist.  It is still slightly mis-colored and puffy...just enough to remind me that I knew better.  I sat there watching the incident seemingly in slo-mo and thinking "I know better than this".  I got a "stinger" out of it and it was sore - it still is,  just a bit.  Fortunately it wasn't serious...but it could have been.

I was able to wear my watch today, and that's progress.  I thought about it awhile  and remembered so many times when I did things I knew better than to do...so many times it was just reflex action, no thought involved...until the pain...then I thought about it a lot.

Like the time recently when I tried to run and jump into my pick-up when it was rolling down the driveway.  I missed and came away with some scrapes and a torn hamstring...and it was all for nothing since the truck stopped on its own...well,  with a little help from the trailer it ran into across the street.  I wrote about that one.

There was the time in Fort Ord, California, when I was working on a loading dock unloading a deuce-and-a-half truck off a flat-bed trailer.  I stuck a pry bar under a chock block and slammed the bar against the trailer rail expecting a lot of resistance but the block hadn't been nailed down properly and the block sailed off without much resistance at all...and the bar bounced back and banged me in the head.  I wrote about that one, too.

In Arizona a long time ago, I was watching a group of truck driving students performing maintenance.  One group was working on a battery.  I asked the student with the wrench if he had disconnected the battery,  when the wrench grounded out against the battery box, made contact with his wedding ring,  the whole thing sparked, arced,  and the student screamed (just like a little girl).  He whipped his hand away, and flung his wedding ring through the air.  We spent quite a bit of the rest of the afternoon searching the cinder parking area for the wedding ring...and found what looked more like a wedding "C", the balance of it was melted into the black ring around the student's finger.

I have a 1968 GTO.  Not everything under the hood is factory stock.  Some things are kind of...well...jury-rigged.  For instance, the throttle return spring is mounted onto the alternator mounting bracket.  I had to make an adjustment to the linkage that required taking the spring off for a second or two, and I knew I should have turned the engine off before I tried to put the spring back on but I didn't.  And when I pulled on the spring to put it back in place it slipped out of my hand which then plunged thumb-first into the cooling fins on the front of the alternator, (those little impellor-looking things that spin on the front of the alternator) and felt the impact on my thumb like a machine gun.   I know it was only a micro-second 'til I pulled my thumb out, but when I did, the end of it looked like one of those cartoon exploding cigars, only it was all bloody.

For a long time the Army has used a split-ring type rim for truck tires.  The safe way to fill a tire on a rim like that is to put it into a reinforced cage because those rings can come loose while the tire is being aired up and I mean it can come off with a lot of energy.  One time in Texas I was in the driver's seat holding the RPMs up (Army trucks have air hoses you can attach to the truck's air system and use it to air up your tire;   when using that system you have to keep the RPMs high enough to keep more air in the system than is in the tire)  while another soldier aired up his tire.  We didn't want to take the tire a quarter mile across the motor pool to use the cage, so we used what we called a "field expedient" and turned the tire so the ring was down and the driver sat in the rim while he filled it up.  When the tire was almost filled, the split ring popped off.  The fenders on an Army 5-ton are about shoulder high on me.  Sitting in the cab of the truck I couldn't see the soldier on the ground while he aired up the tire;  he was on the passenger side.  But I heard the ring pop and I saw the driver and 250-lb. tire...and his air hose...fly up above the level of the fender, slowly roll over, and plummet back to earth.

Unfortunately, I could go on.  My point is that there are rules for tools.  And we violate them at our own peril.  We learn some of them in shop class, some from our dads, some from job training.  They include things like:

A screwdriver is not a pry bar (or a chisel)

Don't open a hot radiator

Shut off the electricity (or disconnect the battery) before working on electronics

Relieve the pressure before opening any hydraulic system

Turn off an engine before working on it

Don't jump on a lug wrench

Don't step over a slack cable

Don't jerk it;  apply pressure gradually

And don't swing a hammer across your arm...

...or you will find yourself saying:  "I knew better than that..." just a second before the pain begins....