There is a sort of jocular American folklore around duct tape as a universal expedient. Eighty years ago, I believe, one heard of "chewing gum and baling wire" as that which kept rickety equipment going. Somewhere in the last forty years, duct tape replaced baling wire, perhaps because so many fewer Americans work at baling hay.
I had never heard of duct tape used in first aid, but on Thursday I saw it. A crew was working out front to run a new pipe from house to main, bypassing the old lead pipe. By mid-afternoon it was time to remove from the hole the machine that had pushed a path for the copper pipe, and then pulled it back from the house. The machine was clearly heavy: my eyeball estimate was a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five pounds. The two men who were removing it from the hole were strongly built, but one injured his upper arm. The man I took to be foreman had to come out from the house and help with the machine.
Somewhere along the way, the injured man and another walked down to the truck. The other applied to the injured arm two six-inch strips of duct tape, one along the bottom of the deltoid muscle, one along the biceps. I have seen runners with bits of tape applied to a leg, but never duct tape.
More practically, I think, my wife brought out ibuprofen for the injured man. He remained on light duty for the rest of the job, and I suppose will be on light duty for a couple of weeks. Given that most of his work involved digging, I'm not sure what that will be.
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