'Agree With Everything - Deny Nothing - Embellish All

Monday, November 14, 2005

God Damn Blast Bugger and Fuck Health & Safety

The scene: Morrison's, in Whitehaven. I stoop to take a basket at the door. It is the last in the stack. For some reason I cannot lift it. I tug it. It sticks. I pull again, hard. Too late, I realise the basket's firmly attached to the metal contraption in which it's stacked. The chrome tubes of the basket-stand tip over, knocking me on the head, while below the wheels on which it swivels turn alarmingly and hit my shins. I am within an inch of collapsing in a heap of confusion, basket, stand and self splayed out on the floor. By some miracle, I recover. Standing up, still basketless, I notice that the stand next to this one also has but one basket within. That basket contains a simple notice: For Your Health And Safety, This Last Basket Has Been Attached To The Stand.
That's very helpful, I think. Clearly somewhere an under-manager has ticked his Health & Safety checklist and all is well with the world. So that's all right then.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

A colleague at work has coined a description of over-enthusiastic application of H&S concerns as "The Safety Trump Card". There can be several good technical, business or just-plain-common-sense reasons for doing something, but it needs only a two-of-hearts kind of safety "concern" to win the argument! "Safety Trump Card", the delighted player calls, as he once again succeeds in thwarting any kind of progress.

The only way to get your own back is to direct them to www.dhmo.org, and to tell them you are considering using some of this compound in your next project. The “Special Precautions” section of the MSDS data sheet ( www.dhmo.org/msdsdhmo.html ) is usually sufficient to get them to void their entire hand of Safety Trump Cards in one go. If you’re really lucky, they’ll do so in a very public manner, in order to show what good, safety-conscious folk they’re being.

21/11/05 9:11 pm  

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