What are some of your craziest near-death experiences? I'll explain. I work as a millwright for a

company that manufactures automation equipment. Today I was working at a bench near the machine shop

when my IT guy came in to install my new shop PC, a speedy little unit armed with a P4, 768 megs of

RAM, and one hell of a heart. I know, you're jealous.

I leave the bench to go and enter my password on the shiny, new piece of tech, and have a few

words with him about the sad state of affairs. No more than a minute and a half later, I hear a horrible

sound of metal hitting something solid, and then what sounded like someone threw the biggest ninja star in the world across the shop.

By the time I looked up, it was past us, and as I turned around, it struck and mangled

a shelving unit against the far wall.

I ran over to make sure the machinist was okay because he was working on the lathe, and

I figured out that was where it came from.

The lathe is a machine that can turn pieces of

metal at over 1,000 rotations per minute. He was fine, but pretty shaken. Turns out the adjustable

dead stop at the rear of the lathe came apart, no fault of his own, at a high speed and hit

the floor and went merrily on its way. The dead stop is a four-foot piece of one and a half

inch solid steel bar,

not something to be messed with at 100 miles per hour. It was jammed about half an inch deep

into reinforced concrete. The worst part was, I followed the path it took, and it was directly

over the top of the spot on the bench I was working at. I bought a lotto ticket and a big

bottle of Jamesons

when I got home. Tonight we drink, because we didn't get decapitated today. I was working

at a normal boring office job and I needed to come in on a Saturday to get some work done,

...