There are many professions when you think about it where you are always 1 second away from danger or disaster. Think about it for a moment: Pilot, truck driver, car driver, electrician, carpenter, plumber, race car driver, etc. There are many professions where if you aren't on it 8 hours a day you are blind, dead, maimed or injured in some way.
I was recently telling a friend of one of my daughter's how I enjoyed being an electrician from age 12 when my father trained me to be one during summers. Often I would either work as an electrician off and on into my 20s after I stopped programming computers professionally in my early 20s. Working with computers I found in the 1960s wasn't usually going to kill you but you might die from overwork then like I almost did from working 12 hours a day 7 days a week from midnight until noon when I was 20. I was too young yet to realize this sort of 7 day 12 hours a day was a killer then because I was young an inexperienced with life.
But, there is the danger of being an electrician which I relished as a 12 year old and even as a 15 year old when I was temporarily blinded by a short for about 15 minutes time and my eyes hurt for the next 3 days while they healed. Or the time when I was 17 that I fell 15 feet off a ladder through a T Bar ceiling onto a pile of wood at a dry cleaners we were building at the time and couldn't breathe right for 2 or 3 minutes time while tradesmen gathered around to see if I would die or have to be taken to the hospital or have last rites or whatever. I survived all these things and more like crawling under houses into cat poop with black widow spiders because it saved my Dad hundreds or thousands of dollars because the under house space was too little for him at 6 foot 2 and I was just 5 foot 2 then at 12 (even though at 13 I was 5 foot 10 and able to pass for 17 at age 13 often.
But, how is being an electrician dangerous like being a soldier?
Because you are in danger of getting shocked almost any day you work. For example, I have received literally thousands of electric shocks but mostly the 110 volt variety that won't usually kill you but all the same can be very very unpleasant to deal with. Why? Because often you are in a position as an electrician where people cannot turn the electricity off and you have to work hot. So, being blinded from shorts where a hot wire touches a metal box that contains often switches happens a lot when working hot. The metal spatters so hopefully you are wearing safety goggles when you get copper wires spattering into little balls of liquid copper into your face and hands often. And then your eyes hurt because of the arc weld situation with the box and the hot wire. At the time all you are usually trying to do is to bend a copper wire to wrap around a screw to mount it in a switch or something like that at the time.
But, there are many other dangerous things besides just that. Like you cannot wear any metal rings especially wedding rings if you don't want your ring fingers to be burnt off during an electrical short.
And unless you want to die you never never wear metal necklaces like gold medallions especially because that can actually kill you not just burn off one of your fingers.
So, it's dangerous to be an electrician but also dangerous to be a carpenter, plumber, truck driver, pilot etc. etc. etc. Even a butcher is dangerous if you are trying to keep your fingers on your hand still. So, the list goes on of jobs that remind me of being a soldier.
Now during the coronavirus you wouldn't want to be a doctor or a nurse because you might get it and die or worse infect a loved you that you wouldn't want to go living without.
So, EMTs, paramedics and nurses and doctors on the front line likely are and will be dropping like flies from coronavirus. I just heard that one hospital in Massachusetts just lost over 100 employees because of potential exposure to quarantine.
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