No biggie. If the old man is a do-it-yourselfer, you know what Dad wants. He wants power tools.
You can’t have too many!
What say a nail gun? Affordable, efficient and perfectly safe — as long as nails don’t somehow end up penetrating an essential body part.
Like your brain.
What a scary story that was about the Shawnee guy. No use rehashing how the nail pierced his skull, or how the doctor removed it — not with surgical instruments but with a screwdriver and a claw hammer.
Hey, doc. Sounds like you’ve built a shed or two in your day.
Nearly everybody’s a do-it-yourselfer. And while not every DIYer has a dramatic nail-in-the-skull tale to tell while drinking beer or cooking marshmallows over the cutting torch, most of us do have some kind of home improvement horror story in our past, and the scars to prove it.
Those of us who are still alive to tell it, I mean. Nearly 200 Americans, mostly guys, aren’t so lucky each year.
In fact, there has been a slow but steady rise in injuries involving power tools and workshop equipment since the mid-1990s. The Consumer Product Safety Commission isn’t sure why, other than the fact that the do-it-yourself ethic is bigger than ever. There’s a Lowe’s or a Home Depot every mile or so, it seems.
But the safety commission does have an array of statistics to make just about anyone think twice before remodeling the bathroom or putting down new flooring in the kitchen.
According to the agency’s most recent Hazard Screening Report, more than 400,000 people are treated in emergency rooms after unfortunate encounters with power tools or workshop equipment.
It’s far higher when you add in injuries treated at doctors’ offices or clinics. A sampling from one year alone:
Power drills — 12,981 injuries; six deaths.
Portable circular saws — 22,430 injuries, including amputations; none fatal.
Grinders, buffers, polishers — 45,471 injuries; five fatal.
And on it goes, with nail guns right up there. Misfired nails result in 34,000 injuries annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That’s a 200 percent increase since 1991, when nail guns were mostly only in the hands of the pros. Other federal agencies estimate an even higher total of 40,000 injuries each year.
Now just about any of us can afford one!
Of course, there are many other ways to injure, maim or kill oneself doing home repairs, without ever coming in contact with a power tool.
You can, for instance, get a nasty shock because you thought — just this once — you could get away with leaving the breaker switch on while you fixed a light switch on the third floor. Because what a pain it was to be tromping down to the basement power box over and over again. And how bad a shock could it be, anyway?
Or you could nearly break your neck because you were in a hurry and didn’t bother to ask your 15-year-old son to come steady the ladder while you put up the Christmas lights. Only thing that saved you was the Weber grill, which still has a dent.
Why, you could even develop deep chemical burns on your right ankle, left knee and left wrist while stripping the deck because you didn’t bother to read the directions on the can of deck stripper. OK, you did. But you figured the stinging pain was minor skin irritation and not something that would result in nasty scars, one of which resembles an upside-down violin, when viewed from your own perspective. So you just toughed it out until you were finished.
Therefore, don’t let that nail-gun story deter you from giving Dad what he wants this Father’s Day.
Go ahead and get him a power tool.
After all, in the wrong hands, even a tie can be lethal. Though I admit I’ve never heard of anyone slicing off his hand with one.
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