When I shared my first experiences with the C# programming language with you, I mentioned in a subordinate clause that I nearly amputated one of my toes at that day.
The good news is, dear readers, I didn't actually amputate my toe. But I tried. And it nearly worked.
It all started with my father's intention to arrange mold (later to be seeded with grass) over a meadow at my parent's house that was sort of dead because it suffered from heavy moss siege. Basically there are two jobs in this whole process: The first job is loading the mold into a wheelbarrow and pushing the barrow to the dead meadow. The other (more relaxing) job is raking the mold over the meadow.
Because I'm such a nice guy, I offered my father to help him, and he happily told me to (guess, guess) take over the first job. The folks among you that have some experience with gardening know that loading the first 10 or so wheelbarrows is sort of fun, but at a certain point it starts getting plain annoyingly. So with an increasing number of loaded barrows, I became more and more huffy: It started getting relatively warm, the barrow was bulky and the mold heap did not seem to scale down significantly.
At this point I should probably describe the instrument I used for loading the barrow: It is called "stone fork" and is basically a dung fork but with 9 beaks (each is about 30cm long) instead of 4. Such a fork does an extremely well job when being used to maneuver excavation. At the same time the beaks can be very sharp. But read on.
So I was using this stone fork and my mood became worse exponentially, which ultimatively caused me to work more "intensively" with the fork. (Intensively basically means that the fork movements were less controlled now.) Feeling more and more huffy at this bastard-like mold heap who wouldn't scale down just a tiny little bit, I pushed the fork into the heap as hard as I could. And then things went wrong very quickly.
Instead of digging into the heap, one of the beaks drilled through the top of my shoe, right at the place where the toes are, and it left the shoe somewhere between toe-cap and sole. You cannot imagine how shocked I was in this moment: I did not feel any pain, but it was more than obvious that a 30cm-long steel nail had pierced through my worn-out Adidas shoe, which concluded that some part of my foot must be pierced as well.
For a few seconds I just stood still with the stone fork in my show, the barrow next to me and the ruthless mold heap in front of me. At some point I realized that not feeling any pain either meant that my body had entered some sort of state of shock, or that (which I considered absolutely unlikely) the beak had not hit one of my toes.
The only way to find out more about the injury was to get rid of the shoe. So I worked up the courage to pull the beak out of my shoe; I started to pull the fork slowly. But I didn't succeed because I guess that I was too afraid to pull really hard. I then sat down on the grass and set out to open the shoelaces for being able to see some details. Opening the shoelaces went really well and I still did not feel any pain, but the main problem still persisted: I needed to get rid of the fork.
Finally I started to move the half-opened shoe a bit and I again did not feel any pain. I slowly started to remove the shoe, and to my big surprise my foot was fine and all five toes were nearly intact except for a scratch at one toe. Wohaa!
All-in the beak went right between two toes on its way through my shoe. Even a few months later I still shudder when realizing how fortunate I was.
Now I know why safety shoes with steel toe cap were invented.