punx1325

A little over a year ago I was in a car accident where a Jeep plowed into the back corner and side of my friends Integra at 70+ miles in a 35. He was getting over and this drunk driver was going WAY too fast. Long story short if my friend had been a foot further in the other lane I'd be dead today, or atleast that's what the cop told me.

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If something seems too good to be true, then it probably is....

Derwood

Here are several:

A few months ago I was driving down the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago when my allergy medicine kicked in and I nodded off going about 60mph. I didn't hit anything, but I guess I started drifting because a truck honked at me real loud. Well that woke me up, and my heart went about 200 bpm until I got off the road.

When I was about 14, I worked at this museum and there were some huge willow trees (i'm talking 60 or 70 feet tall). Well of course, the fun thing to do is go and swing on the branches. Well I do that and the branch breaks, or so i think. I land on my butt, and a second later, a HUGE rotted out limb lands about 2 feet away from me. Thing must've weighed 200 lbs. Had it landed on me, I'd probably be paralyzed (at best).

One more. I was on my uncle's speed boat when something I was playing with went overboard. Without even thinking about it, I just dove in after it. The boat drifted over me, so when I came back up, I hit my head on the boat, almost knocking myself out. Not to mention the idling outboard motor that was now about a foot from my head....

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"You can't shoot a country until it becomes a democracy." - Willravel

irseg

My biggest one was more of a near-death experience for the other asshole.

I was driving my '93 Cougar (nice heavy car) on a 2-lane bridge w/ no shoulder. All of a sudden this riced out Civic gets the bright idea to cross the double yellow and try to pass about 4 cars, and starts barreling straight at me. I can't swerve out of the way as the road is too narrow, all I can do is lay on the horn and flash my lights.

I do some quick thinking and figure that it's best to slow down, but keep some degree of forward momentum--I'd rather plow through his car than the other way around, plus mine had a big weight advantage. So I kept rolling at about 20 mph as his ricemobile's fart can was blatting its way down the road towards me. At the last second, the last car in the string of 4 he was trying to pass (he only made it that far, guess his VTEC sticker didn't add as many horses as he expected) slammed on the brakes and let the Honda asshole back in. We would have collided not even a second later.

I'm glad that wreck was narrowly avoided, but ever since I've been kind of curious to see the outcome of a head-on between a 2-ton Mercury Cougar and a riceburner.

Bleed Me Dry

I was in Europe a really long time ago and was crossing a street. Being young and dumb I thought the traffic laws were much the same as the U.S's. I was wrong. They have run signs instead of walk signs because the drivers assume that you'll get out of their way. Long story short, a bus tried to speed up enough to run me over and it brushed the back of my shirt as I was frantically running out of its way.

The adrenalin rush makes it feel like your head is going to explode.

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Bite Me...

But Only If Invited

Skettios

Administratively, many towns and cities prefer that you call 911 instead of trying to get a hold of the local police department directly.

When I lived in Duvall, WA, they didn't even have a police number. In East Lansing, the Police line patches over to 911 after like 6pm.

The point... calling 911 isn't that big of a deal anymore, cities and counties have all but given up their responsible use campaigns. Besides, it's not like I was calling because someone called me a bad name. I had a minor accident on a crowded freeway.

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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Frederich Nietzsche

tritium

I was doing 85mph in a 70 just north of Jacksonville, Florida in November of 2002 when a Ford Probe in front of me slammed on brakes for no reason whatsoever -- I think the driver fell asleep, woke, paniced and jammed on his brakes. We were both in the fast lane and I had a trackertrailer blocking me to the right.

Naturally, I jammed on my brakes, but being that I was heavily laden with cargo, I couldn't stop in time. As I saw that I was going to collide with the Probe, so I swerved into the grassy median to my left. The dirt under my left tire caused the net-braking to fail and the whole truck turned to the left and became perpendicular to my direction of travel. Somehow, I didn't panic and I calmly steared a little to the right to counter the turn, and fortunately my tires grabbed just as the truck began to rise up on the left side (tires off the ground). The truck immediately swerved to the right and the left tires slammed down.

Somehow the whole operation increased my stopping distance and used up the energy in my momentum -- I managed to stop.

As the tire smoke cleared, I saw the driver of the Ford Probe (New York license plates) with his middle finger in the air....

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Blah.

Poloboy

First of all, the speed limit was 120km/h, so it's not like I was doing twice the speed limitor something. Secondly, the double exit lane is about 3/4 of a kilometer long (half mile or so) and it's straight and uphill. The speed limit doesn't change on the exit lane because there's an intersection at the end of it, the lane isn't turning into a residential road.

Jam

oh ok i was assuming it was some kind of normal exit

Poloboy

Never assume things are normal in Canada.

440sixpack

Sure, I've had a few.

One a car wreck of course. Sitting in the front passenger seat, got near t-boned while taking a left turn. The Jeep Wrangler that hit us impacted about 2 feet behind my right shoulder. Fortunately we essentially walked away, despite the fact that I think I blacked out for a minute or two after the crash. After we were checked and dismissed from the hospital and I returned to the scene to find out where my car was, I got an idea of how bad it was from a gas station attendant at the intersection where it happened. When I identified who I was, he looked at me stunned and said incredulously "You were in that and you're okay?".

Another one was a pure dumbass move on my part. Preparing a drill press/lathe for shipping to it's new home as the Army base I worked at at the time was closing, I was told I would have to just cut the power wire (240 V) to the thing since it was hardwired. No problem - except it didn't occur to me to shut the power off before I used uninsulated, metal wire cutters to chop the line. Bang and a big spark, and I was holding a tool where the cutting blades had partially melted from the electricity, yet I never felt a thing. I saved that as a memento.

Same army base (hmm seeing a pattern here), the exhaust pipe on one of our test machines exploded during a test. It used high-pressure nitrogen gas to rapidly actuate the mechanism of the machine, and the old exhaust pipe just let go. A 2 foot chunk of heavy steel pipe flew across the room and missed my head by about 3 inches, bashing into the door behind me. I got a long lunch break out of that one.

Yet another test we were running involved high temperature, high strain rate tension testing of 93% tungsten to simulate anti-armor penetration properties. Using the same test machine, we'd flood enough electricity through the sample to make a 1/4 inch thick tungsten specimen glow like a light bulb filament in less than a second. Well once the cables were not properlay attached and the resulting short circuit melted through 1/8 inch steel plate on another piece of test equipment. So the trend here is the government was trying to kill me.

There have been a couple more long shot situations that probably weren't quite as dangerous, but the possibility of death is always there.

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Be a victor, or be a victim - David Vincent

My Toys:
1970 Dodge Challenger R/T 440SIXPACK
2003 Dodge Ram 1500 SLT QuadCab 4x4 5.7L Hemi Magnum