Terrible faux pas, 1992, by Snilbert

From MemoryArchive

Who: Snilbert
What: Faux pas
When: 1992
Where: Sydney, Australia

When I first came out of university, I couldn't get a job because it was the recession, so I wound up working on a factory floor at my old man's business. The business was the manufacture and supply of potato crisps. Anyway, one day, a new guy started as a machine technician. While he wasn't maintaining the machines, he was in charge of cleaning the blades from the slicers. I thought I'd go and welcome him to the fold, so I approached him while he was overseeing the cleaning of the blades, which involved setting them up on a machine which was automated to shave micrometers of them.

He was a guy in his fifties and as I learned later, from Chile. So I walk up to him, and trying to be jovial I say: "So, have you lost any fingers yet?" Without missing a beat, he holds up his hands and says: "No, I've still got the nine." And he really did only have nine, with the little finger of one hand completely missing. Apparently he lost it in a metal press when he was a young man.

I felt terrible, I couldn't believe I could've been so flippant. However, he was good natured about it and probably enjoyed watching me clumsily trying to backpedal out of that one.