Artist dodges forklift accident thanks to film

An American art student I met across the internet a few years ago had realised that it was going to be ages before he could make a decent living from his canvases, and said that he was torn between a couple of friends who'd given him conflicting advice. One had said there was easy, well-paid work going at the loading bay he worked in, but another had warned that the first friend was liable to get the artist involved in a forklift accident.

I'm not supposed to use names here, so I'll go with job titles for this, as it's already getting confusing. The nervous one was a librarian who'd gone out to the States after a boyfriend; she was a mutual friend who had introduced me to the artist. The other was a forklift driver who'd already got a hilarious reel of stories about narrowly-missed work accidents by his mid-twenties.

It turned out that Librarian was worried about Driver's habit of messing around at work, and his colleagues were all as bad as each other - bear in mind I got the story from only one side here, it's quite likely she was exaggerating. So straps would be loosened on entertaining loads, causing, say, a great sheaf of uncut paper to slip and fall from the forklift's tines to the merriment of the warehouse aisles.

I wasn't working for a personal injury claim company at the time, so I didn't realise how dangerous that could be, and when I said so (well, typed it, this was over the internet) I got a bit of an earful and a few references to follow up. There are some scary statistics regarding industrial injury out there.

One piece of anecdotal evidence regarded a man who had noticed that there was a loose strap on the pallet he had just lifted on the truck; he leant out of the cabin to adjust it, accidentally knocked the 'down' lever and was decapitated. I never saw any documentary proof of that, but it did push my opinions closer to the Librarian's than they had been.

And there are some scary tricks you can play described out there too. I don't think Driver ever did this, but there's a recommendation on a frivolous website that a bored forklift operator should lift a portable toilet while there's someone inside, and either leave the door wedged against the lifting mechanism or lift it to the full extent of the mechanism so that there's a long jump down. That sounds like an open invitation to pain and personal injury claims.

But the scariest thing I saw was a short film that appeared to be a German training video that features a young man named Klaus gradually getting involved in more and more gruesome accidents. I was convinced it was real for the first few moments, and all the "hilarious!" comments were talking about the training-film style of acting, but the severing and slicing take the forklift accident to new levels.

Librarian was not amused, thinking it would be likely to make the Artist more blasé about the job. What it actually did was inspire him to go and start making short films, spending money rather than earning it, but servicing the demands of his muse in the process. Driver got to be a dancing drunk in one of them. And he still paints; there's even a forklift, fortunately accident-free, in one of the recent ones.

Can I claim?