Just had this one passed on to me by my brother in Alberta. A friend of his is working in some sawmill in the north of the province and just quit his job because of this incident.
So he's working for his lumber yard that's your're pretty average semi-permanent mill. The whole facility can essentially be packed up in a week and moved to another site closer to the source, as most everything is stored in, or built out of storage containers. My brother's friend used to to exploratory drilling for some company that looks for oil deposits, but he got laid off almost a year ago when oil took a hit. Both operations need people to maintain large moving parts and keep things clean so that they don't wear out, so he was able to transition to this pretty easily.
So three days ago the one conveyor that hauls the single-cut boards starts smoking at one of the bearings. Seems that the meth-heads that are 90% of the employees at this site are not so keen to grease the bearings for the conveyor (he takes care of the larger equipment, the other guys are supposed to maintain their own little sections). The guy turns off the machine, hangs an orange flag over the switch, puts a sheet of paper with, "machine being greased, don't turn on" on the door to the control panel room, goes to the breaker, turns it off, and puts one of the locks on it. He's just about to walk away when he decides to take the key out of the lock, just as a precaution.
So the guy is 15 minutes into greasing the bearings and he's gone through two tubes of grease (this is a 45' length of conveyor, with a hundred or so bearings, and they are all pretty much bone dry. He goes to the automotive supply shed to get another tube of grease to finish up. He comes back to the conveyor, takes a knee and jumps back 6' when the conveyor springs to life. He runs to the control panel and one of the meth heads has just turned it back on. He flips it off, and screams at him, "why did you turn this on?". The meth head tells him that the boss told him that a circuit probably tripped, and to turn it back on (boss is off-site and one of the meth heads radioed him saying the machine was broken). He asks the meth head why he didn't read the sign or notice the flag on the control panel. No answer, he then drags the guy to the breaker panel and asks him how he turned it back on? The guy picks up the lock out of the garbage, which has obviously been sawed.
He walked off the job right there and then, as he knew he was pretty much living on borrowed time around that crew.