View my full profile in the FreeIndex Hypnotherapy Directory directory.



 Accidents and Gender  

I used to work in Casualty and the "well, duh!" factor ran particularly high in summer.  Classic orthopedic injuries occured frequently with lawnmowers, especially to those who mowed bare foot and manage to reverse the thing over their toes.  The other classic lawnmower "injury" were those who`d pull it out from the shed for the first time that year to find it out of petrol ("gas" to the Americans in the audience tonight), so they`d get a length of garden hose and siphon it from the car's petrol tank, forgetting that wide diameter tube produces quite a rapid flow under a very large head of pressure.  Apparently, swallowing petrol is bad.  Best not to smoke a ciggie for a while.

We'd have people digging their vegetable patch, again bare foot, washing their 1st floor windows with unsecured ladders and using circular saws to trim hedges (!!?).  And of course there is always the classic BBQ injury resulting from the usual male determination to have the biggest and best fire of the entire neighbourhood - "throw some more petrol on it!" and the classic "lets play with the car engine to give it more vrooom" whilst the engine's running.

The most common denominator of the rise in garden/yard accidents was that most attendees were male.

As opposed to the annual seasonal Christmas rise in stabbings, where most perpetrators were female (naturally most stabbees being male).  Too many relatives forced into close proximity with each other, arguing over the turkey, I guess.

And then of course, there are the hampster incidents....but that`s another
story.