Why not to pick things up off the floor
When I wasn't rising my bike the whole way to school, I'd ride about half way, leave it at a friend's house, and walk with him the rest of the way, then after school we'd go back to his and I'd ride the rest of the way home. One day when we were walking back, we stopped, can't remember why, and I saw this little shiny piece of metal on the floor. I picked it up, and examined it. For some strange reason, I decided to see how smooth the top and bottom edges of it were, so I slid my index finger and thumb along the edge of it.
Turned out it was a razor blade.
Yep, I picked up a razor blade off the floor and ran my finger and thumb along the blade on either side.
Seriously.
As I did this, I watched, as it sank itself inside my thumb and finger. I quickly realised what was happening and threw it to the floor. By this point, there was already rather a lot of blood on the floor, my shoes, and my clothes. It was trickling out of my finger at quite a steady pace, and was being spurted out of my thumb a bit harder and faster, seeing as your thumb has it's own pulse. My friend didn't really know what to do, and neither did I, so I just squeezed the base of my finger and thumb with my other hand. Bad idea, just made it squirt out even more. Hmm. We were about a 5 minute's walk away from my friend's house, so he decided we should knock on someone's door to get a bandage or something. He then saw a cyclist go past, and for reasons I couldn't quite understand, asked him if he could help. I didn't see how a random cyclist would be able to do anything but it turned out he lived in the house right next to where we stopped him, which was rather lucky. By this time I had blood all over me, and the cuts were stinging like hell. The cyclist guy got a bucket of cold water and I sunk my hand into that; it quickly turned a very deep shade of red. After the bleeding had slowed to a controllable level I dried my hand, wrapped it in a bandage and walked the rest of the way to my friend's house, and his mum drove me home.
After the bleeding had stopped, we could examine the extent of the damage. I could open the cut and see quite far inside my finger and thumb, the cuts must have been a good 5 or 6 millimeters deep, which may not sound like much on it's own but that's a fair way to go inside a finger or thumb. I could see where the flesh had been ripped apart, was quite interesting actually. They took ages to heal, and I can still faintly see where the blade went in, 5 or so years later.
I was pretty bloody lucky I didn't get some hideous disease from this. For all I know, the razor could have been used, been used by someone who'd taken drugs, someone who was HIV positive, someone with some other blood disorder. I also have no idea how long it had been there, could have been rusty, a dog could have pissed on it... who knows what could have happened. I had all by jabs and vaccinations up to date so I wasn't too worried, and nothing did seem to happen, but, who knows, some things can take a while to show up...
If you ever see a small piece of metal on the floor... don't pick it up ;)