Fidget spinners have just been an annoyance to parents until now – but one Swedish man has discovered the hard way they can be potentially disfiguring in the wrong hands.
According to Nordic newspaper Expressen, machine repairman Alexander Dögl, 25, almost lost his thumb after some distinctly adult hijinks with the popular device ended in tears – and a lot of blood.
‘I wanted to try, but it did not last long,’ he told the paper of his experience with the time-wasting toy, adding: ‘ I do not think it was so funny.’
Maybe that’s because he decided to take the gadget to the next level.
‘We competed to see who could spin the longest and came up with the idea to try it out with compressed air,’ he confesses, revealing he sprayed the air on the device, increasing its rotation to dangerous levels.
‘It went so fast that it exploded,’ he recalls.
‘I felt that it hurt, but first we laughed. Then I looked down and saw that my finger gushed blood. The thumb took the full blast.’
Alexander ended up in the emergency room.
‘They said it could be a fracture of the finger. Every tendon in the thumb had been injured.’
Alexander got six stitches and is now worried that the summer plans may have been ruined. His message: don’t mess with kids’ toys.
This article originally appeared on That’s Life