One of the most common questions I get asked is “Hey, do you ever cut yourself?” The question is often asked as if to establish some element of danger or risqué about an avocation as a “glass-man.” Of course, while I am tempted to describe some horrific breach of my outer shell facilitated by an unplanned meeting with one or another sharp edges of any given piece of our material of trade, the accurate answer is, “not frequently.” Of course, this is not to say that I haven’t had a few life-defining moments with broken glass.

As a kid I was chasing my brother through our old Victorian house in New York when, about to catch up to him (and in the mood for a good fistfight), I was met face-on by a half-door-size piece of Florentine glass that made up the top half of the door he had slammed trying to buy time to evade me. I almost lost an eye, but instead got just a small cut.

In junior high, a friend and I were “playfully” engaging two sisters at their home in a game of tag. It was a dark night and the patio door had just been cleaned; that would be the patio door that the younger sister (my quarry) ran through and then shut behind her. I proceeded to run through it literally, without opening it, never noticing a full glass door in the backlighting. The entire door’s worth of glass cascaded down and shattered on the concrete. I still have a v-shaped scar on my chest as a reminder. I think we called it the mark of “Vorro,” although I’m sure Don Diego Vega was nowhere near.

Now, as far as working with glass, let me establish some relevant context. My studio has traditionally fabricated from 1/8-inch thick art glass sheets. So for a long time the worst hazard was a relatively small piece of thin, comparatively lightweight glass that might break without warning. We now employ a lot of coarsely textured art glass that, when scored and broken, has almost a serrated edge. If you grab and hold tightly it will cut you in a perfectly geometric pattern of tiny cuts. These would be a lot like paper cuts, so while easy to bandage, they still sting a bit. This is everyday glass, but it’s still glass. There’s a reason they temper glass to make sure that should it break, it will break into small, small, small pieces.

When we moved into kiln-casting and larger scale architectural projects the dynamics of risk changed a bit. After all, a 32 x 42 x 1/8-sheet of glass is nothing like a 65 x 96 x ½-inch piece. Everybody tends to be exceedingly careful. We know the safety protocols and protective equipment is employed. A crane and power lift are in place and we stay within the guidelines for use. Of course, this doesn’t mean we still aren’t constantly on the lookout for a potential freak accident (after all, we are working with glass); we’re on the lookout to ensure we have time to react and avoid injury.

I’ll let you in on a secret. The worst cut I’ve ever gotten in the glass business was at the studio one night, cutting stencil for an etched-glass project. I was working late, I was tired and I accidentally dropped an Exacto knifepoint right into the top of my leg. Does it mean that there’s danger in the job? Maybe, but I could be working in a big city somewhere, darting across the street to Starbucks and get hit by a bus, all for the sake of a needed cappuccino. So I’d say the glass business, on my end, is a pretty nice business (and a safe one, too) at which to work.