gun shot wound
I'm sustaining a self-inflicted staple gun injury. We were upholstering the benches for the art car on Saturday, and I managed to impale my pinky finger. I was holding the gun the wrong way, put my finger on the end when I couldn't get the damned thing to work, and shot a staple through my finger. In my (sorta) defense, the staple gun was counter intuitive. As you can see from the diagram to the right, the handle is backwards. My experience with staple guns has always been with a rear facing handles. (See example) And we had two guns. One with a rear handle, one with a front handle. There were helpful arrows on the handle and on the base that pointed out where the staples would fly from in the counter-intuitive gun, but they were not helpful enough.
I'm just glad that it wasn't the compressed air staple gun that later showed up. That would have shot the staple completely through my finger.
Things I learned while dealing with the staple sticking through my finger:
- It doesn't immediately hurt. You sort of look at it and think, "oh fuck, that's going to hurt." But the pain doesn't really start for awhile. I almost wanted to leave it there.
- Pulling it out hurts. Don't test it by wiggling it to see how badly it's going to hurt to pull it out. Don't pull slowly. Yank that sucker out as quickly as possible.
- A hole through your finger bleeds a lot. Teeny tiny hole, but lots and lots of blood.
- Band-aids are a remarkable invention. They stop the bleeding pretty quickly and keep it stopped. Fortunately, I'm accident prone enough that I keep a stash of them in my car at all times.
- I had no idea how much I use my left pinky to type until this injury. You'd think that the infrequent use of the letters "Q" and "Z" would counterbalance the abundant "A"s but the damned shift key requires a lot of pinky movement.