My company is extremely safety-conscious, sometimes to the point of (at first glance) absurdity. Given that we’re an engineering firm and there are plenty of opportunities for folks on projects to get hurt or killed, I can’t really ding them for that emphasis.
One thing we do is start every meeting (including most conference calls) with a safety moment, a reminder, a tidbit of info to help create a better, safer workplace (field or office) or home. It’s usually pretty interesting or useful info.
But sometimes …
For a big project review today, I got a preview of the PowerPoint presentation. The person doing this is one of my sharpest employees. On the first (non-title) slide, there was a safety tip about Purell skin sanitizer, which is alcohol-based, and some rather gruesome photos showing what happened to someone who had just Purelled his hands and then went out for a smoke (hands shielding the match, not fully rubbed-in sanitizer, hands burst into flames, horrible burns).
Since I know some folks who live and die by Purell, I wanted to look up more info so I could forward it to them (non-smokers, but, hey, safety first). And, so, of course, I ended up on this Snopes page, which debunks the whole thing.
Which goes to provide two lessons/tips for today:
- Even smart people can get fooled by something that sounds plausible and that they don’t verify, especially when told go out and find something interesting to talk about.
- Good safety is smart safety. You can only effectively defend against so many threats. Make sure the threats you’re focusing on are real ones.
Mad props to the staffer, who, in a call I was just on, raised this particular issue and emphasized the need to research info before passing it on.
Thanks for the link to that website, there was a lot of useful myth debunking there. No surprise that “Obama is a radical Muslim” is number one.
Oh, man, Snopes is one of the most useful sites on the Net, no question.