Bill, I'm glad that you are safe. I have always preferred batch feed disposers where the top needed to be locked before they would start. My In Stinkerator was like that. My current Maytag, which I had to buy in 1992 because the plumbing under the sink in my new house was too high for the drain on an ISE batch feed, has a top that just sits in to operate a magnetic switch, but it offers a bit of protection. I'm glad that you are laughing. That's the sort of story that, years ago, would be repeated to neighbors and retold among friends and many who heard it would develop a phobia about disposers and not use one any more.
What a shame there was not a heavy glass cover involved like used to be used in kitchen lights. They make a really neat noise when they fall from the ceiling and crash and your case would have involved being hit by a projectile, too! We had a couple of big glass drum-shaped covers on the lights in our kitchen. There were 3 or 4 little screws that held them onto the fixture. Even though mom had fluorescent work lights, which she usually did not use, she always had higher wattage bulbs than were recommended in the ceiling fixtures. One night she had been working at the island and had just turned away when one of the drums right over where she had been working let go and fell. What a noise it made; very distinctive and loud. She kept saying that it could have fallen on her head and killed her. We all wanted to replace it immediately, mostly to cover the bare bulbs, but she had given us an idea. It was not until those drums came out in plastic that it was replaced after changing to lower wattage bulbs.
The sound that used to get my brother and me laughing to the point of weakness was the sort of dull thud of a terra-cotta pot full of soil and plant roots breaking, not from a long fall, but more like when it slipped out of your fingers just a few seconds too soon and a few inches too high over the patio where you were going to set it down. Even the extra work this caused would be broken up by sudden fits of laughing.
Sorry I let fantasy run away with me. It was a situation just too full of potential for my twisted mind.
Tom