Learn safety by accident?

After last week’s article on the perverseness of machinery, I thought it might be helpful to follow up with one on the subject of safety—for my own good.

I did a little research on the topic and found out two things. First, there are lots of people who are approximately at the same level of safety consciousness that I am; and, second, that there is a long list of organizations, agencies, and departments whose job it is no keep us all safe.

Owing to the fact that there is an internet (which itself has some safety issues) there are literally at my fingertips, and yours, thousands of sites to help educate us on the subject of safety. Reading some of them could cause you to fall asleep and hit your face on your keyboard. Others might cause you to fall down due to excessive laughter.

Some of the fall-down-laughing sites are the ones with titles like “Funny Insurance Claims.” Apparently the writing skills of the claimants directly correlate to their proneness to accidents. Ostensibly that factor doesn’t apply in my case.

Here are a few vehicle accident descriptions from the “Swap Meet Dave” website that I simply have to pass on:
1. The gentleman behind me struck me on the backside. He then went to rest in a bush with just his rear end showing.
2. As I approached an intersection a sign suddenly appeared in a place where no stop sign had ever appeared before. I was unable to stop in time to avoid the accident.
3. The accident occurred when I was attempting to bring my car out of a skid by steering it into the other vehicle.
4. I was backing my car out of the driveway in the usual manner, when it was struck by the other car in the same place it had been struck several times before.
5. I left for work this morning at 7 a.m. as usual when I collided straight into a bus. The bus was 5 minutes early.

I once read a consumer safety article which reported that most accidents happen either at work or at home or at play. I assume that this groundbreaking bit of information is available to the realm of human knowledge only because there was a study or two done to confirm it. I look at it this way: there isn’t much else besides the activity of sleeping and not too many people are using knives or machinery while they sleep.

I guess it is the work dimension of our lives that produces some of the most intensive programs for enhancing our safety. Maybe there is no such thing as an accident—only careless, and thoughtless behavior of which there must be plenty even outside of the Butterbean household. Safety engineers try to help us overcome those deficits by thinking and caring. To that end they devise checklists, forms, tips, disclaimers and reminders and slogans to keep us all safe and keep manufacturers out of court. .

These slogans were meant to get you thinking: “Crushed hands or missing fingers may affect your golf swing.”-- and “Protect your hands, you need them to pick up your paycheck.” I am adding “Don’t deserve a ‘break’ today.”

At my other job, I saw a six-page safety checklist for construction workers beginning a job which required a truck. I think the whole ideas of the lengthy form was to keep construction workers in the office filling out forms where injuries could be reduced to the kind for which they might not have to fill out the ten-page worker’s compensation claim form—injuries like paper cuts, writer’s cramp, bruises inflicted by keyboards, and headaches.