internet meme: wound
June 3rd, 2008
My favorite wound:
I was 16, working as a prep cook at The Rustic Inn and one night I had to train a new cook. I can’t remember the woman’s name, but she was nice enough, I guess. One of the things we prep cooks were responsible for was to slice a load of ham and swiss for the evening’s Chicken Cordon Bleus. I was showing her how to work the slicer, which was one of those classic, giant deli slicers with the rotating blade and metal handle to hold whatever you’re slicing.
It wasn’t going very well. I was trying to demonstrate to her exactly how to slice it, what thickness to set the blade to and so on, but the cheese kept kind of sliding out of the handle mechanism. So I, playing it cool, was all like "Of course, sometimes the handle won’t hold it, so you just sort of use your hand to keep it steady." And I reached up and held it with my left hand.
On the next slice, my hand went too far and the outside of my left pinky finger slid into the slicer. It was so quick, sharp, and smooth that I didn’t even notice what was happening for a second. I think I only realized what was happening when I saw the blood spin around the rotating blade and splatter the cheese. Ick. I pulled my hand back quickly, and saw that it hadn’t gone all the way through, that the skin was still attached.
"Umm, no problem, you know, no big deal…"
"Are you sure? It kind of looks pretty bad…"
And I grabbed some paper towel and wrapped it around my finger, where it quickly became blood-soaked. My finger didn’t hurt at all, but my humiliation at looking like an idiot was acute.
When it healed it scarred over very strangely.
Many years later, when I learned what the word hubris meant, I was able to retroactively categorize many incidents in my life as pertaining to hubris. This was one of them.