The first time it happened was in seventh grade, in shop class. What I liked most was working on the engine lathe (Isaak Naumovich, hi!). I remember it like it was yesterday: I clamped the workpiece in the spindle, secured the tool holder, adjusted the tailstock coupling, tightened the screw fixing the carriage to the bed, and then tightened... although never mind, you don’t know what an engine lathe is anyway. The point was that I made a mistake and set the cutter clearance not to 0.1 mm, but to 1.1 mm, i.e., ten times more than required. I turned on the lathe, and the workpiece began to rotate. I fed the cutter. Because of the unacceptable clearance, the cutter started hammering hard against the workpiece, then the workpiece snapped in two at the spindle and whistled past my temple. If it had happened a second earlier, the workpiece would have ended up in my head. I never worked on the engine lathe again.

The next time it happened was a year later. My friend and I (Vitya, hi!) were riding on top of the freight elevator in our building, and like any teenager I decided to show off in front of my friend. When the elevator was on the second floor, I stepped from the elevator car onto the door rail of the third floor. The elevator passengers went down to the first floor, and I stayed on the third, inside the shaft. So the layout in the elevator shaft ended up like this: the freight elevator on the first floor, my friend on the elevator, and me on the third floor on the door rail. But then the elevator started going up. When it was already approaching the second floor, I jumped from the door rail onto the roof of the elevator. But I lost my balance; one leg slipped and got between the elevator car and the shaft wall. Luckily, my foot hit some elevator part, and it stopped abruptly. There was half a meter left to the third-floor door rail. One second later, my right leg could have been at the bottom of the elevator shaft, while I myself would still have been on the roof of the elevator. I’d have gone for another ride, but you can’t get those years back.

The most recent time it happened was on December 3, 2015. I was walking down Rymarska Street when a big chunk of ice from a roof glanced off my back. A second earlier, it would have hit me square on the head.

Have you often been in a situation one second away from death?