A challenge for Julio
I must have been through thousands of safety inspections in my life. OSHA, FAA, USFS, BLM, DOD, MMS, CHP, DOT, SMS, and so forth, you name it.
It always amazes me how common sense seems to disappear lately and more and more rules appear instead. Did we really make everything safer by having more rules and bigger safety manuals? Or do we now have so many rules that we can’t remember them all? Let’s hear some comments!
I think it is just lost of common sense, period. That and everything is so rush rush now days that people just seem to skip some of the mostly simplest things.
Mate, you are preaching to the choir here!
So many rules that, seriously, do not need to be written down and codified. Sometimes I think we are doing the gene pool a disservice by protecting the stupid from their own stupidity.
When your operational safety manual is so big it gets split into two volumes you know sanity has long since become a distant memory.
We, for a short time, even had a manager who memoed that “Unless all food placed in the staff lunch room fridge had a list on it stating the full listing of ingredients, then bringing home made or commercially made food without it’s packaging and ingredient list into the workplace would be banned forthwith.”
Sounds stupid, right… well it gets better.
Reason for this rule…. a staff member who had a habit of stealing other peoples lunch had had an allergic reaction to someone else’s lunch that they “mistakenly” consumed!
I kid you not…. even better was that the manager pushed for this to become a company wide policy and wanted to extend it to including the banning of cakes brought in for birthday parties!
Needless to say that the backlash resulted in said manager being promoted sideways to avoid the inevitable lynchmob.
To expand a bit on Parou’s observation: Rules tend to get written when someone breaks the “unwritten” ones. I’ve been in a similar situation. A number of years ago, a person that I worked with (who shall remain nameless) was assigned to clean a bathroom at our mutual place of employment. (Which shall also remain nameless.) A few minutes later I smelled a bad (and disturbingly familiar) odor coming out of said bathroom. I quickly ran to the bathroom and quickly asked my colleague what he had put into the water that he was using to clean with. He replied that he used bleach and ammonia. I pointed out that bleach and ammonia make chlorine gas which, in high enough concentrations, is lethal. (I knew what chlorine gas smells like because I had taken a course on applying pesticides in High School.)
Work rules mandated that I report the incident. Luckily, nothing happened to my colleague; but he *was* sent to a safety-training class and, sure enough, a sign appeared on the janitorial storage closet reminding everyone not to mix ammonia and bleach. Yeah, there may be times when we think that there are too many rules or that some rules are outmoded or don’t make sense — and, yes, those rules should be reviewed and either modified or discarded if necessary — but sometimes the rules are there so that we don’t go mixing bleach and ammonia and killing ourselves and someone else in the process.
True Reynard, but in your case they took the sane option and simply reinforced the instructions that are on the bleach and ammonia bottles which say “Do NOT mix with other cleaning agents/chemicals”.
The true modern manager would initiate a company ban on using both ammonia and bleach, and because they are so obviously dangerous mandate all employees have to sign a memo saying they understand they can no longer use them. Later when the janitor complains that he cannot do his job without them the manager would respond with “That’s not my problem, find something else and just do your job!”
Aha, The “True Modern Manager”! *Now* I understand where you’re coming from! Yes; I’ve dealt with a few of those too, I’m afraid. They’re usually some freshly-minted MBA* who decides that s/he knows more about how to run a company than anyone who has actually *been* at the company for a few years and decides to change procedures and impose new rules and protocols in the name of “efficiency” and starts firing workers — and piling their work on the rest — in the name of “productivity” and, when things start going downhill (as they *inevitably* will!), starts firing everyone and outsourcing their jobs to other countries until the company is just a shell (albeit a highly *profitable* one) of it’s former self. Yeah, I know what you mean now. (Bitter? Me? Damn right!)
*More Bad Advice
well this is kinda random but still related to this comic…. will we ever get to see what happens when chuck gets his Corsair finished? so much hilarity could result i just know it
I probably have broken a lot of them at the airport by just walking somewhere or by teaching cadets ramp checks
I wonder how many top managers have reached their positions by being promoted somewhere where they can’t do that much harm to the actual business being done…