My partner and I were putting a loaded stretcher into our ambulance. We had lowered the stretcher a bit to transfer the patient onto it from his hospital bed, and we hadn't raised it, so we were on either side of the head end to lift it up and into the back of the unit. We had just lifted it up and were pulling it in to get it past the safety catch when it stopped moving. I thought it was probably just caught up somehow, it happens a lot if you don't get the angle or position right. So I pushed in on the stretcher harder. I noticed my partner was bending over; I thought he was trying to look under the end of the stretcher to see what the problem was. I just pushed harder. Then my partner cried out, "Stop!", I stopped, and he stepped away, holding his hand up to his chest. He had a nasty little gouge on his index finger, and the surrounding area was darkening.
It turns out he had somehow gotten this finger between the stretcher frame and the red lever used to retract the safety bar from catching on the safety catch when pulling the stretcher out. I think that normally there is a spring in there somewhere that holds the lever or the bar up, but it was broken on this stretcher, letting it just flop down, allowing someone to put their hands in the wrong place to get pinched like this.
The patient was only being transported to a rehab center next door to the hospital where we picked him up, and my partner did not believe his finger was broken, so we did the transport before contacting our office. My partner did not believe he needed to go to an emergency room immediately, so we returned to the office, from where he was going to go to the immediate care clinic my company uses for non-emergent work-related injuries. There was another employee whose partner had called out, so she was told to go out with me.
Now the stupidest work-related injury was not the one I just described my partner getting. The stupidest work-related injury was the exactly identical injury his replacement got on our very next call while doing the exact same thing after being warned and shown what not to do!