Everyone gets a cut or a nick once in a while, especially in our line of work. So I want to ask, whats the worst cut you have recieved (cutting meat) and how many stiches did you get.
16 stitches in the two middle fingers on my right hand...was cutting a short loin it flipped over and threw my heand into the blade. company got in trouble for not have a guard over the blade. I had two huge bandages on my right hand for 6 weeks. i couldn't bend my finders. i just put my hand in a plastic bag and wrapped my first finger and pinkie around the knife handle and kept cutting. it hurt like a bitch but i kept going.
16 stitches in the two middle fingers on my right hand...was cutting a short loin it flipped over and threw my heand into the blade. company got in trouble for not have a guard over the blade. I had two huge bandages on my right hand for 6 weeks. i couldn't bend my finders. i just put my hand in a plastic bag and wrapped my first finger and pinkie around the knife handle and kept cutting. it hurt like a bitch but i kept going.
16 !?! Sounds like a nasty cut!
I was asking cause I've had a few bad ones myself... They used to call me "Stitch" When I was a noobie cutter... My worst was 10, in my thumb, boneing out an aitch bone.
had a knife jump the guard on the steel. Student Doctor was going to stitch it up at the ER but she gave me Novocaine to freeze it...I'm allergic!!! Woke up on a heart monitor still not stitched up a few hours later. I had cut the tendon and nerves too. By the time the orthopedic showed there was nothing he could do. 4 stitches...and I can't bend my left thumb anymore or feel anything in it
__________________
Joe Parajecki
Operations Manager/ Partner
Kettle Range Meat Company, Milwaukee WI
Member Meat Cutter Hall of Fame and The Butcher's Guild
even now i almost do that all the time...knife jumps the gaurd on the steel...after reading this i think i ll try to slow down when using the steel. never know when there will be a student doctor handling the emergency room. ..my fingers are still sore even after all these years. i guess its scar tissue...they throb the worst when its cold outside. at least i can still bend them and i have about 80 percent of the feeling in them but they are still numb in places.
this must be a touchy subject. how come none of you old timers are sharing stories about your battle wounds? too many bad memories? '/
this must be a touchy subject. how come none of you old timers are sharing stories about your battle wounds? too many bad memories?
I'm superstitious about talking about it. I have not YET had a terrible cut. I make sure I say "yet", because I know that if I use the word "never", I'll probably get a bad one the same day and look like a fool. I've probably been cut at least 100 times with tiny cuts. It would be neat if there was some kind of light you could puts your hands under and see every cut you're ever had.
I said this in another thread, but I'll say it again here. My worst injuries are mental injuries given to me by people in management. Meat managers, store managers, low level asst store managers, supervisors, vice presidents of the company, and the like.
this must be a touchy subject. how come none of you old timers are sharing stories about your battle wounds? too many bad memories?
My worst injuries are mental injuries given to me by people in management. Meat managers, store managers, low level asst store managers, supervisors, vice presidents of the company, and the like.
Don't want to hijack the thread. Lets keep it about getting cut. But I want to explain. I had problems with management over paperwork regarding keeping records for temperature checks, documentation of all clean up/sanitation, ground meat fat content tests. The wall deli was hot. some spots were 42-56 F, some were ok. The wall deli was too hot, all the time. A permanent problem. I told them our "corrective action" methods don't fix the broken wall deli. They wanted the paperwork to show that the temperatures are 40 or below, or if higher that I took corrective action. Looooooooooog story. I started looking like a trouble maker to them, because I wanted to tell the truth, but they wanted paperwork that showed the temps are good in case someone dies and there's a lawsuit.
The clean up was the same thing. They wanted me to sign papers saying we're cleaning certain things every day or week. Such as the walls. I was not cleaning the walls every week (do you?), but they wanted me to sign a paper saying I do. I wouldn't sign.
They wanted ground meat tests on a machine that doesn't work.
These are examples of the kind of problems I had with management. I had to leave a 20 year job over it.
I completely understand. sounds like the usual corparate bull****. I had to deal with that at Giant in Virginia and I wasn't even the market manager. I feel really bad for the guy who was they wanted all these logs. not just fortempatures, and tests, they wants cleaning logs, they wanted logs of what we cut that day an d how much of it we sold. for example the meat manager would right down cut 6 family packs of chuck steak, sold 4. bunch of bull****. poor bob he finally put in for retirement and left. he was there for 30 years. when i started there we had 5 cutters and 2 wrappers. when i left there were just 2 cutters and one wrapper. one of the cutters was bob the meat manager. How was he supposed to keep up with those stupid logs , have an hour log weeklyt meeting with management and still fill the huge case by 9 with no help? they wouldn't let me come in til 2 and i was expected to just stand there u ntil 8...10 on saturdays...bob was expected to cut everything. he only got one day off a week. rediculous that kind of stress can make a man crack.
By the way I asked bob to join our club he is an avid internet user. I said I would nominate him for the hall of fame. he said more like the hall of shame. he doesn't seem interested. i think he wants to forget about cutting meat it was that hard on him.
I completely understand. sounds like the usual corparate bull****. I had to deal with that at Giant in Virginia and I wasn't even the market manager. I feel really bad for the guy who was they wanted all these logs. not just fortempatures, and tests, they wants cleaning logs,
Me too. I wasn't the manager. I was working lots of nights. Night man cleans up and keeps the cleaning log. There are several things on the cleaning log that don't get cleaned. the wrapping machine, the walls (weekly) for example. There's a lot of wall space. The cooler, the fish cooler, the cutting room. Does anyone here clean every square inch of wall space in the the entire meat dept every week? We didn't but we had to sign something saying we do. All that paperwork and cleaning coudl keep a person busy 8 hours per day. They need a full time person just for that.
fdarn too bad we didn't meet sooner. I work for Harris Teeter in the Virginia/ Washington DC/ Maryland areas. Good Company not too many hoops to jump through and we are always looking for good cutters and Market managers
__________________
Joe Parajecki
Operations Manager/ Partner
Kettle Range Meat Company, Milwaukee WI
Member Meat Cutter Hall of Fame and The Butcher's Guild
when i was boning out a pork leg my knife slipped and went in my wrist........the embarring part is i was showing one one how to do it..lmao..................and i cut the whole side on my right index finger on the saw........thank god it was a bonless blade.....it tok 12 stitches
Everyone gets a cut or a nick once in a while, especially in our line of work. So I want to ask, whats the worst cut you have recieved (cutting meat) and how many stiches did you get.
We had a rail with a bad area in it where it changes from a main rail to a side rail. I was pushing a hindquarter and when it got to that area, it came off the rail. On the way down, the wheel from the hook grazed my forehead a little. This is how I looked the next day with cut cleaned up and eyes blackened. I stopped to check if I was OK and put some Neosporin (sp?) on it and finished the last 6 hours of my shift.
Cut my left ring finger fingernail off; I don't remember how many stitches. Cut the knuckle of left middle finger (my only visible scar from cutting meat, the fingernail hides most of the other one). My company requires a drug test after any injury and I had a trip planned with my wife to be and would have had to postpone it a day for the test so to avoid that my store manager (an ex Vietnam medic) patched it up. I spent the next day at a water park with a blood soaked and leaking bandage on my hand (I probably would have been thrown out of the park these days).
Had seven stitches in my left middle finger boning out an aitch bone from a lamb leg. Went to the ER (got in quick, it was Easter Sunday!) The lidocaine hurt worse than the cut. Went back to work and within an hour my knife poked through the hip socket on a damn aitch bone from a ham and jabbed my left index finger. No stitches but I stopped boning out hips the rest of the day! I saw a fellow cutter take the better portion of his right thumb off when a beef shank spun on a slant saw. I had to pick the nubbin up off the saw and send it to the ER with him. They reattached it and I guess it worked okay cuz he came back to cutting several weeks later.
I worked with a man who has a scar running The length of his right middle finger on both sides from when he split his middle finger in two on the saw and cut his index finger almost completely off when he pulled his hand away from the blade. This happened in the 1950's.
The worst injury from a shop I worked was a cutter who filleted his index finger on the boneless saw. Due to infection he had to have several skin graphs and did not work for about an year.
By the way, what he was doing when he injured his self was opening cry o vac on the saw with it running. Don't do that.
worst injury I ever saw in a shop was when that meat wrapper shot the meat cutter next to me in the chest and killed him.
moral of that story is, don't lie to a meat wrapper for four years you going to leave your wife and marry her, then let her find out you and your wife are fixing to go to the Bahamas and your wife has a brand new thong bathing suit !!!!
worst one outside the store was a hubby shot our meat wrapper and her boyfriend in the parking lot right after I walked by and was about 20 feet past them, shot them through the window on her side. VERY bloody sight !!!
We had a rail with a bad area in it where it changes from a main rail to a side rail. I was pushing a hindquarter and when it got to that area, it came off the rail. On the way down, the wheel from the hook grazed my forehead a little. This is how I looked the next day with cut cleaned up and eyes blackened. I stopped to check if I was OK and put some Neosporin (sp?) on it and finished the last 6 hours of my shift.
I HAVE A QUESTION ?? Did that teach you anything ??? My first and ONLY lesson from hooks and rails was a tree hook catching me across the shoulder & back of the head. after that I would give them a push & stay back from them
Big Beef I did apply at harris teeter a couple times but i didn't get hired by them. i think they got a lot of cutters filling out applications in that area.
what is it with slant saws? i don't trust them that is the saw i was using when i had my short loin accident. when i had to use one again at another store i was very wary of it. there is just something not right about them...and one of you pointed out that a guy had an accident with a shank on a slant saw...that sounds alot like what happened to me only it was a short loin.ever break down a slant saw for cleaning..when you unhook the top wheel it slides off and conks you on the head"? what a jacked up design. my opinion anyway..yes i understand that they are supposed to have more edge on the cutting because of the angle of entry and blah blah....but thats what i think of them.
cowboy you have seen some serious stuff huh....i hope i don't have to witness anything like that..let alone twice.
I had a cutter come home from work one day, his wife told him she wanted a divorce. He went drinking He came to work at 2am put the saw together and then jumped into it I came in at 5 and found his dumb ass on the floor He bled to death of course the fact that he almost cut his f-in head clean off probably had something to do with it
__________________
Joe Parajecki
Operations Manager/ Partner
Kettle Range Meat Company, Milwaukee WI
Member Meat Cutter Hall of Fame and The Butcher's Guild
I HAVE A QUESTION ?? Did that teach you anything ??? My first and ONLY lesson from hooks and rails was a tree hook catching me across the shoulder & back of the head. after that I would give them a push & stay back from them
well, I was a little more careful after that, but it was a bad rail in a new store. Long before that,
I worked some wholesale and pushed 6 truckloads of beef quarters every morning across the plant. That's 6 X 65-70 beef ( X each beef having 4 quarters) . Starting with mixed pieces, I'd have to separate fronts and hinds and even left fronts from right fronts and put them all on separate trails. You had to be real fast to keep up with the lumpers. You'd start with 6 pieces maybe. When you return, there's 8. You take those 8 and quickly as possible run them to where they belong and IF you're lucky, there will only be 8 when you return. It's easy to fall behind. You may find yourself pushing 15 pieces. You can get them going pretty fast. Sometimes a jerk will open a rail half way to your destination right when you get all 15 pieces moving well. You might not see it. Then you have to back up, close the rail and get going again knowing that when you return, there might be another 15-20 new pieces. Also, sometimes in that 65 beef, you have to separate one beef for a customer that's buying just one. But you have to make sure the 4 quarters belong together. They're numbered and you may have to watch for, say, the 4 pieces with a #37 on them. They won't come off the truck together. Sometimes in addition to the 6 trucks of 65 beef, there would be 2 trucks of arm chucks. Those are easy. Dont have to be separated by side or number. You can get em going real fast on those rails and they do go around corners well without falling.
My point is I have lots of experience pushing meat on rails and that hindquarter should not have come off the rail. I know what makes hooks fall off a normal rail and I know how to avoid it. Hard hats were required in that wholesale plant and it's a good thing.
I had a cutter come home from work one day, his wife told him she wanted a divorce. He went drinking He came to work at 2am put the saw together and then jumped into it I came in at 5 and found his dumb ass on the floor He bled to death of course the fact that he almost cut his f-in head clean off probably had something to do with it
