“What we see depends mainly on what we are looking for.” — John Lubbock Every chemical plant I have ever been in has these minimum requirements for personal protective equipment (PPE): hardhat, safety shoes, and safety glasses with side shields. OSHA tells us that it is the employer’s responsibility to assess the workplace for hazards [...]
“It’s what you do next that counts.” — Lisa Mackay One of my favorite movies is The Great Waldo Pepper starring Robert Redford as a barnstorming pilot after World War I. One scene is seared into my memory. Waldo Pepper’s friend, Ezra Stiles, crashes during an air show. The crowd surges out to the wrecked [...]
“The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.” — George Carlin I was recently astonished to hear someone talking about OSHA-required hard hat color codes. “Yeah, and green is for any who works in forestry,” they said. I wanted to contradict them on the spot but stopped. [...]
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” — often misattributed to Albert Einstein I don’t spend much time in court rooms. I’m not a lawyer. I tend toward law-abiding behavior, so I’ve not been a defendant. I refuse to be an expert witness. (Lawyers seem to want me to follow [...]
“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” — Charles Dudley Warner A few weeks ago, we were treated to the sight of icicles hanging from NFL Coach Andy Reid’s moustache during the Chiefs-Dolphins playoff game in Kansas City. That gut punch of arctic air to the Midwest overwhelmed us. Here, our [...]
“Automation is driving the decline of banal and repetitive tasks.” — Amber Rudd Five years ago, I had the opportunity to give a TED talk called “Deadly Jobs”. I talked about the hazards that consistently contribute to work-related fatalities and the deadly occupations in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently released [...]
“The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.” — Chinua Achebe Back in December 2021, the BLS report showed that for 2020, the Year of the Pandemic, the total number of work-related fatalities in the U.S. was 4,764. That was significantly less than for the year before. The [...]
“Heavy metal? Like Rock of Ages?” — Isis Hainsworth in Metal Lords It’s hard to pin down a definition of heavy metal, whether you are talking about the rock-n-roll genre, or elements from the periodic table. Serious fans (of either the music or the elements) can argue at length about what is meant by the [...]
“…I can feel it in my toes. Christmas is all around me. And so the feeling grows.” — Bill Nighy in Love Actually Although I have on a couple of occasions, I don’t usually give protective footwear as a gift during the holiday season. Most people don’t consider protective footwear to be very festive. However, [...]
“Rather than a prosecutor saying, ‘you have nothing to fear if you have done nothing wrong,’ a more accurate portrayal would be ‘if I decide you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.’” — Sidney Dekker There are thousands of work-related fatalities in the United States every year. Every few weeks, an intrepid [...]
