This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/Ok-Bed583 on 2025-11-18 07:23:21+00:00.
So this happened a few years back, but my fingers still look weird enough that it deserves its own cautionary tale.
There are bad ideas. Then there are the kinds of bad ideas that only show up during the last stretch of a sixteen hour shift in a flour mill when your bloodstream is fifty percent exhaustion and the other fifty percent PBR.
The machine I was tending was ancient. A relic from the 1930s. Nothing digital. Nothing smart. Pure mechanical spite. It grabbed a bag from the stack, puffed air into it to open the mouth, dropped in about nine and a half pounds of flour, and sent it down the line. The sealing and stitching was handled later, a few stations downstream. My only job was to keep this temperamental dinosaur from jamming or exploding.
At some point that night, after too many hours of listening to the same clanks and whines, I had a thought no reasonable person should ever entertain.
What would happen if I stuck my hand in there.
I wish I could blame anything but myself, but curiosity and boredom are powerful drugs. And yes, the machine was running. So I did it.
The machine did not hesitate. It did not care. It did not pause to consider my value as a human being. It grabbed the bag as usual and my hand along with it. My index and middle finger took the full force. I felt the pain in perfect clarity. No delay. No confusion. Just raw nerve lightning. And then I watched the machine continue its cycle like it hadn’t just tried to amputate me. Bag filled with flour. Released. Sent on its way toward the dribbler like nothing was wrong.
When my fingers came back out they did not look like they belonged to me anymore. My middle finger was lacerated clean across the first knuckle on both sides. My index finger already had a bruise blooming under the nail, deep purple and angry. Throbbing like it had its own heartbeat.
I pulled the bloody bag off the line without even thinking. Then I walked off calmly like I was just going to get a drink of water, not trying to keep my insides from becoming outsides.
In the break room I found the first aid kit. That was when the real problem hit me. I could not apply a bandage using the same hand that needed bandaging.
My manager walked in and got the sanitized version of the story. I made it sound like a normal accident. Something that could happen to anyone. Not “I stuck my hand into a ninety year old flour machine for science.”
We wrapped it up. I double gloved. And because medical bills are expensive and pride is dangerous, I went back to work and finished the shift with a partially mutilated hand.
The middle finger works, technically. It just never went back to factory specs. The joint is weird. The nail looks a little off. The scars are faint now but you can still read them like bad handwriting if you know where to look.
That old machine never apologized. It just kept running.
Honestly, I kind of respect it.
TL;DR: Years ago I stuck my hand into a running 1930s flour bagging machine during hour sixteen of my shift because I got curious. It mangled my fingers but I still finished the shift. My middle finger has never looked normal since.