BOFH: I'm not doing this for the benefit of your health, you know "Is he still there?" I ask the PFY, maintaining direct eye contact with him so that I can truthfully claim that I didn't see the Health and Safety guy hanging around the hallway to Mission Control like a bad smell. There's a new push in the company to make the place safer and unfortunately the push concerned doesn't involve …
I was once asked it I'd read the safety manual - apparently this was listed as mandatory for all employees in another manual that was restricted* - so I quipped that I had received a paper cut while reading it. A few days later the delivery man got a hernia bringing the new laminated version round to everyone.
* I'd swear some companies model themselves on Dean Warmer from Animal House and run things on a permanent 'Double Secret Probation Level' so they can instigate wild-cat strikes during the rugby world cup.
I had to handle cryogenics (liquid Nitrogen etc) so was sent on a cold-something-something safety course. Great day out at the Scott-Polar institute listening to stories about being trapped in crevasses, how to put up a tent in a blizzard - nothing about liquid nitrogen but I got a certificate.
@Safety Dance
Argh! Stop making reference to it! It only makes it worse! I had a hard enough time getting it out of my head after watching the latest South Park episode. Although for the very fact Mr Garrison f**ks Donald trump to death, it was worth it.
I didn't know that,explains the frequent airplay over here in Canada (really loathe the remix version that usually gets played).
I usually spend a lot of time trying to figure out if that actually is rural England in the video & where, so I finally googled it, West Kington, near Chippenham.
Icon - A Clever Man With A Hat.
I said it last week and I'll say it again - You've saved the sanity of our team on yet another maintenance Friday.
Instead of changing backup tapes, checking reported disk failures etc while making boring small talk about the coming weekend - we are instead trying to come up with the most imaginative way to kill a H&S rep :)
God bless you.
A couple of years ago, I received a H&S questionnaire that asked some truly bizarre questions
One of the questions asked if I stored chemicals in my office. One of the boxes was for "organophosphate-based nerve agents".
I found myself wondering what would happen if I ticked that box - would they send in a team to decontaminate the building, or make me sit through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38sQFFuTMzY ?
On this note, our company's old leave system required that you select a reason for absence in the case of sick leave. This list included (and this is by no means exhaustive in it's ridiculousness) Scarlet Fever, the Plague and Smallpox. Methinks that if someone genuinely ended up in a position where they had to legitimately select that box, the company might have a little more to worry about than filling in the correct paperwork.
This old system was retired two weeks ago with a new one that actually worked at a reasonable speed. Did they take the opportunity to write up a new, sensible list, or did they just inherit the list from the old system? Go on, take a wild guess.
Taping the grip of a CO2 extinguisher is fraught with danger, there's a risk someone could undo the tape in time. Cable ties, now... They're also good for bypassing those bothersome "grip safety" cutouts on chainsaws and the like, tape peels off when it gets soggy with, uh, "fluids". Or so I conjecture.
During my very first job as a mainframe operator, H&S noticed that there wasn;t a First Aid kit in the computer suite, so they installed one. Unfortunately, they installed it on the outside wall of our office within the computer room, which formed one wall of a not too wide corridor with an IBM 4381 forming the other side of the corridor. There was a lot of white and grey in our computer suite, and the First aid box was white, with a wee red cross on, and mounted on the wall at head height.
We'd never had an accident up to that point. The very first shift after they'd installed the First Aid kit, I spotted that the backup job my colleague had started was about to need a second tape, dashed enthusiastically (hey, I was a newbie PFY, I got over it eventually!) out of the office door, sharp right to go and change the ..CLANNNNNG!! - and very nearly knocked myself out. I later had the fun of dutifully filling in the accident book explaining how I'd injured myself on the badly-positioned First Aid kit. Bizarrely, H&S refused to move the thing to somewhere safer. It did keep me alert for dangers around me, I suppose...
Speaking of H&S and first aid kits...
My old man works for an Utility company (water), and at one water treatment works they had some H&S bods (they hunt in pairs) turn up and inspect. They clocked the First Aid box, and after inspecting it, fastened it shut tight with a cable tie "seal".
My old man goes over and asks "why have you tied the First Aid box shut?"
Bods say "Its so we can tell if someone uses the First Aid box"
My old man then raises the following issue "How do I get in to this sealed First Aid box? Especially with a hand injury?"
Bod goes "You have scissors on site?"
And my old man says, with a beaming smile "Yes we do, a really good set as well. They're in the First Aid box..."
I would pry it out of the wall with my own bloody hands, (actually bloody from the head injury, probably) with bolts and everything, throw a hissy fit with the Health Department blokes, and probably throw the First Aid cabinet in their general direction, while cursing their sorry asses to the 5th generation. And tell them to shove that thing outside of people's head's general path.
But that's just me.
Well, I once actually got the bathroom cabinet over the sink to fall on my head due loose bolts, except it was nobody's fault but my own for the lack of maintenance... It still hurt, and opened a nice bleedy gash on my forehead... Still got me really angry about it.
"I'm intruiged - how does one use a mouse wrongly?"
I was using the scroll wheel to scroll up and down through documents. Apparently that's the wrong way to do it.
What you're supposed to do is *press* the scroll wheel, move the mouse forwards/backwards to scroll through the document, and then press the scroll wheel again to go back to normal mouse operation.
Or, you could choose to tell them to shove the H&S nonsense up their arse, point out that you were using a mouse before they were even born, can remember when the scroll wheel was introduced and have been using it like that ever since then.
"What you're supposed to do is *press* the scroll wheel, move the mouse forwards/backwards to scroll through the document, and then press the scroll wheel again to go back to normal mouse operation."
Since that method doesn't work on a Linux desktop does that mean that Linux desktops are banned by H&S? Hah! Year of the Linux desktop. Only over the cold dead bodies of the H&S reps!
Wait....what? :-)
So… let me get this right.
Middle-click, maybe inserting some text. Move the mouse a bit. Middle-click again, possibly once more inserting some text. Note that the text is inserted, in both cases, in some location near the mouse pointer.
Okay. Well. Good thing that your H&S people cleared that one up.
Either you configure it as a left-handed mouse or you just learn it that way. I'm left-handed and I normally use my left hand on the mouse but I learned to use a right-handed mouse. Otherwise I'd only be able to use my own computer and every other computer in the world would be a challenge.
Plus it means I give the middle finger to every link I click...
H&S visited everybody in the organization. She said my chair was too high, the armrests were in the wrong position and my secondary monitor too low. So, she proceeded to arrange my desk and chair accordingly. Before the door was closed upon her exit, I had "my" desk back the way I liked it.
She's really a nice enough lady, and only doing what she was mandated to do, so no PFY accident for her. Her boss on the other hand is on my Richard Nixon list...
We often take students on work experience and the local schools arranged to get the local FE college to do the bi-annual H&S inspection early last year, no real problems he suggested a few straightforward sensible things.
Then we decided to take on an apprentice with the same college providing the training. As the college thought (incorrectly) the apprentice would be doing more activities than the the work experience students they decided to reinspect. The new inspector made a few sensible suggestions and also wanted the opinion of a fire prevention officer.
I have a close friend who is a full time domestic fire prevention officer he suggested a few things that we did.
When the college reinspected two different inspectors came. They wouldn't accept what the fire officer said and wanted much more than the fire officer or previous college inspector.
I then got a 'commercial premises fire officer' to inspect us who said that they rather than being very prescriptive
and specifying X, Y & Z the FB policy is now to do a 'risk assessment' which meant that as the premises are small and only three employees that thing like having full exit sign-age which the college wanted was not appropriate. Eventually the college put in writing what they wanted which went yet further than what they had requested when touring the property including things like fire segmentation and a rest room for staff (Many lock up shops have to make do with a loo and a kettle)
All in all what with other delays by the college trying to work out which course any apprentice should be on has meant we've missed out on last years and this years influx of potential apprentices.
n.b. We've had over a hundred man years of work on the premises without a single accident, so I think we must be being effective in accident prevention.
When I was in PC support for the company I still work for (hence the Anon), they instituted and ergo program and made the desktop support techs responsible for it.
Much to our chagrin,
And telling them that don't need to do it even though it does involve their PC fell on deaf ears.
I managed to waste about a months time not doing service calls and spend about 15 grand on ergo enhancements.
But I did use the ticket system to log all of the ergo complaints and fixes. My numbers were still there, just not what they wanted the calls to be for.
That program ended pretty soon after that.
Especially when you've just had to put up with 1/2 a days "training" in the safe use of machinery from one of those yellow vested bastards(complete with stylish orange tint safety glasses in our case)
Makes me wish I'd 'accidently' uploaded the skynet program to one of the robots instead of the tame picking/drop program I was made to put in.....
The fire warden is just tasked with checking that everyone has left the building (so you get to go look in the toilets) and then take a register once out so you know if anyone is missing. While you're busy doing that, the place is free to burn, and you've got an excuse that you had more important things to do at the time.
You can watch Mr. Rogers
You can watch Three's Company
And you can turn on Fame or The Newlywed Game
Or The Addams Family
I say, you can watch Barney Miller
And you can watch your MTV
And you can watch till your eyes fall out of your head
That'll be okay with me...
Currently working a late shift, have to be here for the day shift tomorrow (get off at midnight, back at work at 7:00) with a massive headache and a throat like sandpaper. Getting a good BOFH story helps get me along.
Oh how I wish I could "accidentally" flood the area with N2 while those clipboard wielding (anti-common sense) safety bods come along.
And now the client wants me to do a training in "bolt awareness". Because just understanding how a bolt works is apparently not bleeding obvious...
"never attribute to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity" - never truer than in H&S accidents.
I've two really good stories - the first one is from years back, my very first paying job. It was an office-attached-to-a-warehouse setup, and at some point we all had to do a fire safety training. You know, muster points and all that lot. So, anyways, the instructor (he was in-house, not a consultant) says "ok, so if you see a fire, don't go putting it out. ring the alarm and run" Why? Apparently, in some time in the recent past, at another warehouse like ours, there had been a fire and some genius had thought to go grab the fire extinguisher... and then threw it into the fire.
My current job (hence the anon) we had an incident a couple months back where a guy wanted to fasten a big structure better for lifting, and threw the line with the shackle attached up, over the structure. Except, the structure was some 7 m high, so it didn't really reach the top, and instead came right back down and hit the guy in the head. He was looking up, just like in a children's cartoon, so the fact that he was wearing his safety helmet did not save him from stitches.
I've watched this happen.
Many, many years ago I worked a temp job that involved loading trucks. We would load the pallets then the fork operator would load them onto the truck. Then we would tie them down with ratchet straps. The drill was to check no one was on the other side (in practice by yelling "heads!") and throw the two inch wide strap with a half kilo steel hook over the load. You had to really hoof it to make sure it went over, otherwise you had to climb the load and retrieve the bugger.
For three days we had one of those people who can do nothing right. Nice bloke, but everything he touched went wrong, sometimes with bloody results but fortunately only for himself. The final "incident" was him throwing the hook over while standing on the strap. It up went, snapped tight and came back down. He was looking up and it hit him right between the eyes. Funny in retrospect, not so much at the time.
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