When my BIL was younger he was running a lathe in the production area of the shop. I'm going to say that this must have been the early 60's as I remember seeing him in bandages, but don't remember when it happened as I was quite young. But anyways, one particular job they ran, sometimes the piece would come loose in the lathe and it always kicked the piece up and back or at least it did in the past. And remind you that all of this was before safety was really a main thing of working. He heard the piece change sounds so he ducked. When it did, the piece came out and down and struck him in the head. He woke up in the hospital but didn't know why. He also couldn't walk, and he couldn't talk, and he couldn't move his right arm.
He has a plate in his head today, his right arm is totally paralyzed, and at his age of 72, he walks with a cane as the accident did nerve damage to his right side. He also has a speech impediment that gets worse as he gets older. Today he sits more than he stands because of the injury. Even a lot of the things he could do ten years ago, he can't do today as he seems to be getting worse. I would guess that in another 4 or 5 years he may be in a wheelchair.
Back at that time, you never got any settlements from a company. They treated him good as far as a person, and they had a job for him when he went back to work which he was off for maybe a year and a half, possibly two years. He had to learn to walk again, he had to learn to talk, then all of the little things like fastening your pants, buttoning your shirt, so on and so forth. They made him a supervisor of the toolroom when he went back to work. When the plant shut down in '83, they offered him another job in a different division, but by that time he was already showing he was getting worse. The lawyer he had just kept dragging things out as he decided to go on disability. In the meantime while he was off trying to get disability, he was getting $49/month to live off of. He eventually won his case and got his disability and a settlement for something like $10,000.
As far as to what the OP posted, I have witnessed that many times at work in our toolroom. I basically worked with a bunch of lazy people that wouldn't take the time to cut a piece off in the saws, so they would put a 3' piece in our Hardinge Speed Lathe and turn it on. When the machine is setting on about 2000 rpms, it only takes a second or two for the piece to bend and start whipping around. Then all of a sudden the operator finds the time to go use the saw.
There were other time that they would have to set a ring or some thin piece of material in the three jaw chuck. They would use parallel bars to shim the piece evenly in the chuck, then turn the lathe on. The lathe on a few occasions broke out the fluorescent light above the operator. That same operator happened to do it three times that I was aware of.
Then of course while they are setting up, it was more important to talk about a football game, a Nascar race, or just general ******** instead of paying attention to what they were doing, and leave the chuck handle in the chuck then turn the lathe on.
It seems like as time goes on, a lot of them get dumber instead of smarter.
