Factory workers are typically strong-willed, tough-skinned folks, and it takes near catastrophic tragedy to get them to even think about flinching. But there comes a time when even the toughest of factory workers ask themselves, "What did I just see?"
A Reddit thread recently asked factory workers to share some of the craziest things they have seen while on the job. With responses ranging from criminal negligence, close encounters with death, and acts of pure stupidity, there's a little something for just about everyone. All posts have been edited for clarity.
This Is The Reason Factories Have Safety Guidelines
“I watched some guy try to replace a shielding gas cylinder on a welding job. He wasn’t using a cart. Instead, he was rolling it along the edge, with no guard on the valve. He dropped it and the valve landed perfectly on a corner and my god, did that thing make a sound like a grenade and take off like a rocket embedded about three feet into a concrete wall. No one was hurt, but it definitely could have rolled a few heads if it was pointing the other way.
My current factory has less than optimal safety policies. They are too cheap to replace any of the work lead cables, so pretty much all of them are torn up and have exposed wires. So everything just gets a bit of electrical tape. Personally, I refuse to use electrical tape for welding cables for very good reason; I saw some guy’s work lead clamp fall off and tried to weld, instead, the arc went straight through the electrical tape and through his steel-toed boot. Thankfully he didn’t lose his foot, but it did give him quite a burn.”
This Factory Worker Quickly Became A Surgeon
“I worked in a garage spring factory. We were stress-testing a batch of V57s, which are at the higher end of the force spectrum, and one of them snapped, uncoiled, and flailed downwards. The tip caught the leg of one of the workers. It dug into his femur, ripping the leg clean off and launching it on the other side of the factory floor. It hit a forklift, and its driver nearly passed out with fright. The worker eventually made a full recovery, but the driver still suffers from PTSD.
They never reattached the worker’s leg and it was probably ruined when it hit the forklift. They used stem cell treatment to cure his injury. Only the forklift driver was shocked.”
It Looks Like The Weirdo Singing Wasn’t Even The Oddest Person In The Factory
“I came into work one morning (this was back in the ’90s), and the department weirdo was singing, ‘He’s got his whole WIENER in his hands’ to the tune of ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands’ at the top of his lungs. He did this on and off for at least an hour. I finally asked my buddy what was going on. ‘You haven’t heard? Well, when you go on break, read page five of the newspaper.’ I did. Holy cow!
It turned out, and my memory is a little fuzzy on this so some of it may be completely wrong, that the unpopular third shift plant supervisor was arrested the day before. He was at a local indoor pool watching young children swim when he just whipped out his junk and started tugging it. Then when parents confronted him, he ran from the pool, jumped in his car and sped off to a nearby school. He went into the school (again, it was the ’90s), walked to a classroom door and peeked in the window and again started pleasuring himself. I guess a teacher chased him out of the building and he again jumped in his car and sped off. The police picked him up later that day at a playground where he was sitting in his car watching kids playing.
The messed up part was that he came back to work a few days later as if nothing had happened. I have no idea what, if anything, happened to him with our work or the police because I quit shortly after that, and since the internet wasn’t really a big deal back then, it was hard to find out what happened.”
Remind Me To Not Eat Pork From This Factory
Dusan Petkovic/Shutterstock
“Many years ago, while I was in university, I worked in a meat packing plant. From the kill floor, the pigs were divided in half, and each half went down two identical lines where bellies, hams, and other cuts were separated out.
At one point, the rear of the pig ended up on a conveyor that went to a second level, and after whatever processing they did up there, the whole hams came down a chute to rejoin the main line.
Guys would walk to the chute, stick their arm in an inspection port and wait for a ham to come down, snapping their arm in order to get paid time off.
This was the ’70s and early ’80s, so there was not much in terms of video surveillance. I guess it was simply a cost of doing business because in the two years I worked there, I saw it happen twice and heard about it multiple times on other shifts and the line never changed, the ports never locked up.
The station just after that was full of guys with handheld equipment that looked like an angle grinder but that spun a circular hacksaw blade. This removed any remaining hair and other imperfections from the skin of the ham. Part of my job was to change out their buckets full of goo.
Again, over my two years, I witnessed this once and heard about at least a couple more times where one guy snapped and used his skinner to attack the man standing next to him.
The federal inspectors weren’t fond of human flesh mixed in with pig goo that was then mixed into bologna, so they shut the line down for a while.”
Who Was More Surprised: Him Or The Snake?
“A guy was unwrapping a big pallet of parts that had been shipped over from the plant a county away. Apparently, a copperhead snake had slithered into the wrapped up pallet of stuff and wasn’t able to get out, so when he cut open the wrapping, this angry snake slithered out and bit him. He went to the hospital and was fine, but who expected a poisonous snake to jump out at you indoors?”
He’s Lucky That Things Didn’t Get Any Worse
“A new guy, only a few days into hands-on training, almost destroyed a multi-million dollar piece of machinery at a paper factory. He was doing a quality check as he had been taught, but he accidentally dropped the needle-nose pliers on the floor. This was on the second ‘floor’ of the machine, and when the pliers hit the floor, they bounced and angled just right to fit through the half-inch gap in the guards. The pliers fell onto the moving web, and instead of tearing through the paper, they landed just right and were carried into some giant metal rollers. It sounded like an explosion as these rollers and the entire gear train traveling over 1,000 RPM suddenly came to fast stop. Shafts, gears, rollers, and even the frame were destroyed. It took almost a year to get the machine operational again and hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix.
Besides needing to change his pants, the operator was not in any trouble as he was doing what he needed to and it was the tiny hole in the guarding that allowed the pliers to go into the machine. Needless to say, they spent a little extra money and brought the guards all the way to the floor after that.”
They Forced Him Into Early Retirement After The Accident
“I used to work in a cabinet factory, in the custom panels/recycled panels area. We had four different machines there: a chop saw (cuts the short ends parallel), a planer (cuts the faces parallel), a straight-line saw (cuts the long ends parallel), and a glue press (microwaves the glue dry in a couple minutes).
The straight-line saw was a giant monster of a thing. It took table saw blades (14-inch diameter and as toothy as a shark), was belt-fed, and took two guys to operate. We put one long end against the guide, fed it through to shave that side even, moved the guide, fed it back through to get the other side and make the two sides parallel.
The main danger of that machine was kickbacks; if a piece broke and the belt couldn’t hold it tight, it might flop over and ride out on the belt, it might twist and explode into splinters on the blade, or it was entirely possible the blade would launch it back at the guy feeding it. There were little metal fingers that popped up at that end of the belt, but all they were really good for was deflecting it or causing it to shatter right in front of you. Scared me every time one happened. The guard fingers worked on an electric eye; as you slid the board into feeding position, the eye got covered, and the fingers pneumatically dropped; the whole process took about a second and a half.
Well, the company eventually figured out that you could get a couple extra pieces per minute if they cut the pneumatic lines, locking the fingers into the down position. Why it was designed to fail-unsafe, I have no idea.
One of the older guys, at most a year and a half from retirement, was the unfortunate victim of a really nasty kickback. The piece of wood had a crack in it, and the machine launched a sharpened stake worthy of pinning Dracula out of the machine, embedding it about six inches in the guy’s gut. It was raw lumber, so it was dusty and not exactly smooth, even before it split. OSHA got involved, the old guy got a lucrative early retirement, and the fingers got reconnected.”
How No One Died From This Is Beyond Me
“I worked the 2 pm to 2 am shifts doing the electrical assembly for a company that makes the machines that package various products.
We had 480-volt plugs that hung from the shop ceiling. One of the forklift drivers caught a 480-volt plug under the front of the metal roof bar of the forklift, unknowingly. As he kept going forward, it stripped the plug off the wire, and contact was made. This was a HUGE open warehouse, with anywhere from 30 to 40 of these giant machines being built. There was a blue arch/flash that looked like it came from the floor, connected to each side of the building, and bowed up like the shape of a rainbow, with an ultra-bright starburst in the middle of it.
No one died, but the warehouse was evacuated for a few hours. I didn’t see the driver of the forklift, but people were saying his shoes melted to the floor of the forklift, which was also metal. I know he was taken to the hospital, but he didn’t die, or have anything wrong with him.”
“He Never Pulled A Prank Again”
Viktor Gladkov/Shutterstock
“I scored an internship during college at a manufacturer of electrical switches. We made a lot of medium voltage stuff that would usually end up on oil platforms. It was a cluster of hazards.
The best example I have is in the powder coating line. The line ran automatically and moved slowly. Workers would load large pieces of sheet metal onto the hooks and then press a button to make it lift up and grab the drive chain. It would move about a step’s distance in a minute.
They had one idiot that liked to play ‘just a prank’ every day. The guys in the department decided to get him back and attach his fall protection harness to the lift hooks. He didn’t notice until it had pulled him off the platform and was dangling a good falls distance off the ground. They decided to act like they couldn’t stop it and ran away to get ‘tools’ to get him down. They let him get all the way to the preheat oven which way like 400 degrees inside before stopping it. He was screaming and crying right before they stopped it. Obviously, this led to policies being put in place and the group was severely reprimanded.
On the bright side, he never pulled a prank again.”
“That’s The Last I Heard About Him, And I Hope That’s The Last I Ever Do”
“My sister had recently gotten a job at the factory where my mom worked, and they would often talk about people at work together. I remember one time they told me about this guy they worked with who they thought was weird but in a good way. I specifically remember them telling me he was my soulmate because he watched anime.
Over the months, I would learn little details about him such as how he lived with his mom, seemed kind of repressed, and how his mom took all of his paychecks. Then he started following my sister around work like a puppy dog. He would ask her on dates constantly and she would turn him down, but he wouldn’t relent. This didn’t seem to bother her too much because he was this harmless weird guy. Then he started telling her how he had dark thoughts, and how he had a mental kill list of all the people at work. He told her how this one specific woman who was known for being kind of rude was at the top of it. And to that my sister said, ‘I’m going to walk away now.’
The next day, she told the boss about it, and the boss informed the woman about it. She then confronted the weird guy about it, who now knew that my sister reported him. He didn’t come into work after that; we assume he was fired. That’s the last I heard about him, and I hope that’s the last I ever do.”
Being Hasty Doesn’t Always Get You Ahead
Pressmaster/Shutterstock
“I used to work at a major truck brand’s factory where almost everything was made on the spot. One area had a punching machine to punch metal sheets into a form or to punch holes into the sheets.
One day, at the end of a shift, one metal sheet didn’t properly fall on the two buttons requiring the machine to start punching, so a woman, not trying to delay the next shift, went inside the safety cage, leaned forward and pushed the metal sheet onto the two buttons. The safety cage and the punching machine instantly started working again, came down and decapitated the woman. Not only did it delay the next shift, but the whole factory of roughly 3,000 workers was also cleared out.
I only heard this story from one of the seniors, but my stomach churned upon hearing it.”
They’d Soon Come To Regret Not Firing Bob Earlier
“Bob lasted two weeks, which was about two weeks longer than he should have.
During orientation, he challenged me on several of our rules, many of them having to do with health and safety. He did not want to wear eye protection, or closed-toed shoes since it was ‘too hot’ in our climate controlled manufacturing plant. He wore a Bluetooth headset which he proceeded to answer several times through orientation and when informed that personal cellphones use was only permitted during scheduled breaks, he informed me that he was conducting ‘business’ and needed it.
This was when I decided Bob needed to go. However, human resources and the company president also needed to sign off on it and after three hours, they decided I had not given him a fair shake.
Bob was untrainable. He had one job to do – balance material in a centrifuge and make sure it was draining. We had charts posted outlining how many of what to put in and how to arrange things. After working with him for a day, showing him and watching him arrange and balance, I thought that I could leave him unattended for five minutes while I grabbed a washroom break. I was dead wrong.
I started to hear the clanking of metal on metal and ran back to shut down the machine to find that it was not loaded or balanced properly. When I asked Bob why he loaded it against regulation, he said: ‘It takes too long to arrange everything.’
Still, nobody wanted to get rid of him except for me. So as the GM of a manufacturing plant, I spent the next week with Bob babysitting him as he loaded a centrifuge until I finally had to leave him to do my actual job. In under a half hour, from improper loading, he had damaged the machine. While I was loading and setting up the backup, I instructed him to go to the boardroom to review the loading charts and that I would call him back when I was finished.
About 20 minutes later, I went to the boardroom, but there was no Bob. There was nobody in the Men’s room. As I was walking back to my production floor, I noticed that there was somebody in the president’s office. This was pretty strange since the president was out of the office that day and the only two people who are permitted in the office were the office manager and me. But wouldn’t you know, just down the hall, the office manager was happily chugging away at some reports in her office. So I went in, only to reveal Bob watching some of the most depraved Spanish smut on the president’s computer.
While I didn’t have the power to do so, I terminated him on the spot and cleared it with HR and the president later. Apparently, Bob didn’t know how to browse in incognito.
Bob has since filed a case with Employment and Social Development (this is Canada) for wrongful dismissal.”
At Least All That Pain Wasn’t For Nothing
“My dad was the midnight maintenance foreman at a can factory. At midnight, he and his crew would service the equipment. They were just finishing up when he needed to lubricate a 28-foot chain. Normally, he said he had a special tool he made for that job. Well, he didn’t have that tool on him and it was in his box which was at the other end of the machine. He just used the rag he had instead. He wrapped it around his index and middle finger and then dipped his fingers in a tub of grease and put it directly on the chain while it was moving. The chain caught the rag and dragged him 14 feet until the chain turned on the sprocket. When he reached the sprocket, his fingers were ripped off. Along with about a two feet of skin, several nerves, and tendons. He had his shoulder dislocated/fractured and had three compound fractures on his collarbone. He had a skin graft from his thigh, which healed nicely.
He says he sometimes feels the pain in the middle of the night, and his hand always feels cold. When I ask him how he found himself in that position he says, ‘I was tired and wanted to just get the job done. I got too confident and thought I had worked on the machine enough times for it to also know me. Well, it didn’t know me. Machine’s don’t care about you. They don’t respect you.’
Out of all that horror, my family actually got some good from it. My mom was so relieved my dad survived that they made me (I’m the youngest of four, my closest sibling is 18 years older than me). Then with the big worker’s comp check, he was able to buy a nice house in a nice neighborhood.”
Management Saw No Need For Firefighters After This Incident
“A spark from welder flew into an area used by the engineers to store materials. It hit a piece of cardboard and caught fire, so the entire factory started smoking up – but no fire alarms went off or anything. Half of us slowly made our way outside.
Apparently, some of our team leaders had extinguished it with some difficulty, as that area was blocked off by a metal cage. They gave the factory 10 minutes to let some smoke off the floor, and then we were all told to go back to work.
No EMS or anything. It still seems insane to me.”