Anyone who is employed in any industrial job gets to hear a safety schpeel the first time on the job. It's usually about how their company is all about safety and how employees need to do their active part in keeping themselves safe so that they don’t critically hurt themselves and that all the shareholders can rest assured that their money isn’t going to medical costs for the company (mostly the latter).
The company I work for currently has taken this safety policy and blown it way out of proportion. Before I go off on this tangent I would like to make it clear that I love my job and can lovingly laugh at all the maniac quirks that go with it. My friend from Geneva Steel said that he, too, had some odd safety practices and procedures he was supposed to live by then said this (which I agree with), “First you laugh at it, then you follow it.”
Because my company had a higher number of recordable injuries last year, all of the big CEOs took safety at ACME to the next level and then beyond that.
My company has become so safety crazy that they have trained us all on how to walk properly in the safe company way. This is called the ACME technique to help avoid slips, trips, and falls.
They are listed as follows:
- Take your time
- Pay attention
- Adjust your stride to the task
- Walk with feet pointed slightly outward
- Always make wide turns
So imagine walking like a duck or Charlie Chaplin. This is how we are required to walk while we are on company time and on company property.
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| The new ACME walking technique |
They also have a technique for walking up and down the stairs to help avoid slips, trips and falls. See the picture to get an idea.
If we have a flawless quarter with no recordable injuries at work then every employee gets presents from our corporate staff. Last quarter's safety present was a multipurpose flashlight that was made in China with really cheap batteries. Some operators found out that once you put the batteries in the flashlight and turned it on, the entire flashlight would get extremely hot and burn the hands of whoever was holding it. Our managers then strongly encouraged the rest of us to take our safety presents home and to not use them while at work for fear that we would hurt our safety numbers for the next quarter.
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| My safety reward! |
I have altered my companies name in this blog for privacy
I hope you got rid of your safety present because we can't afford to have our house burn down.
ReplyDeleteThat's awesome! We don't have any safety presentations at my work, but I've had to sit through some equally humorous presentations about things like not leaving our laptops in public places and not giving our passwords to strangers.
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