For the Record

In case it ever comes up, which one ardently hopes it doesn't:

I post this because of the way the news media typically report cyclist deaths: A texting, speeding SUV driver jumps the median and swerves across three lanes of oncoming traffic, taking out a cyclist in the opposite bike lane before attempting to flee the scene and ending up wedged through the front window of a laundromat. "It wasn't clear whether the cyclist had lights," the article will conclude.

The laundromat is usually presumed to be innocent.

The driver is as well, unless it turns out that s/he was intoxicated. Being spectacularly and fatally unable to control a motor vehicle while cold sober is perfectly normal, and nothing to be concerned about.

I also wear a helmet every time I ride these days, though I'm doubtful of its usefulness in the above scenario. Helmets are really designed for lesser collisions, such as if you suddenly lose your balance for no reason and fall on your head at five miles per hour. This does actually describe my cycling style pretty well. In fact, I should probably wear it for walking too, and definitely in the shower, though getting it wet might void the warranty.

But one thing I adamantly don't do is advocate for helmet use. I really can't stand sanctimonious helmet-pushers. I was chewed out by one, after a helmetless excursion, a few years ago. She wouldn't drop the subject and actually grabbed my arm and yelled at me for my wanton disregard for my own well-being, a cigarette dangling from her free hand. I haven't gotten over the trauma, and to this day, if I saw her coming the other way on the hike-and-bike trail, I'd take my helmet off and throw it into the lake rather than let her see me wearing one. You don't want to encourage these people.

This was a great weekend to get a little biking in - highs in the mid-70s today, and beautiful and sunny, after wintry mix last week and another bout of sleet and possible snow in the forecast by Wednesday. But one unfortunate side effect of wildly bipolar weather is that you end up getting too sick to enjoy the good days. We did a few miles on the South Walnut Creek trail yesterday. Today, I contented myself with giving the bike a bath and charging up my lights.

Tomorrow I'm reporting for jury duty in District court. Those are typically traffic violations. I'm hoping that if I show up sneezing, shivering, soaked, helmeted, and bitterly resentful, they'll just send me home.

Stick With "Workplace: Mission Zero" and Nobody Gets Hurt

As I was walking out of the building where our safety meeting was held this morning, I caught my high heel on a water hose snaking across the landscaping, and nearly tripped and fell. Driving out of the parking lot a few seconds later, I saw my former boss doing the same thing.

Safety, they keep telling us, comes first. Then they prove incontrovertibly otherwise by their official actions. Yet it is not malice that does this, or shoddy work practices, or cutting corners. It just seems to me that reality keeps rearing its undeniable head and making a neat mess of all the plans, policies, programs, and lofty intentions we keep implementing to deny it.

However, I don't mean this bitterly. Our senior management is deeply serious about the issue of workplace safety, to the point where they happily spend a full day with us in an overcooled classroom, participating with joyless loyalty in roundtables, telling tear-jerking stories, trying to discover... what? Why does the workplace, despite the brightly-colored ideals of unrestrained capitalism, fail to conform to the brightly-colored ideals of a workplace Utopia?

They are genuinely sincere. And we want to be safe... right? I mean, every employee, on a personal level, values his or her own personal ability to go home at the end of the day and do whatever he or she does best - be it hug the kids or go out on a massive happy-hour-instigated bender - to at least the point at which he or she would not, by any means, find it a matter of indifference to determine whether said employee might just as well be wiped out by a stray cement mixer.

Are you with me? (As one of our facilitators kept saying this morning.)

Well, we went through exercises and brainstorming, and determined (over the protests of one of our participants, who I'm sorry to report I thought was not nearly as bright as she should have been) that the most important element in incentivizing* employees to implement safety initiatives was to give them ownership.**

So, while accountability is important, said most of us in our group, the most important element is to personalize and internalize the concept of safety, to where the reason people look out for it is because they want to and believe in it, not because you'll get in trouble if someone gets hurt. Right?

But one woman in my group had a lot of trouble with this concept, and kept arguing it. "I'm sorry, you guys, I'm just not getting it," she said. "You have to have accountability. Why are you all arguing with this? It's got to be the top priority!" Others tried to explain the carrot vs. stick concept to her, all with varying degrees of failure; then time was up, and we submitted our inconclusive results with the rest.

More troubling to me, really, was the beginning of the day's exercises. This is a government agency I work for, and the initiatives we implement today ought to be not merely for the good of employees, but for the general public. So I was deeply troubled when an official representative of the meeting organizer stood up and began our day with an official prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the success of our endeavors today.

Yahweh, Ashtoreth, fickle Fate, lucky chance, or whoever assist us, please, in the preservation of human and animal lives to their full and healthy span. But ordering a roomful of employees, of whatever religion or lack thereof, to bow their heads and participate in a sacred convocation in the name of a particular deity whom many do not observe, upset me a lot. Keeping everyone I work with, including the public, is sacred to me. But invoking a prayer as an opening ceremony which excludes many of us from the get-go is a very bad, bad thing indeed, and I hope to get this addressed by the appropriate, responsible parties.

I've been away for umpteen months, so you shouldn't expect this to be funny. However, if it's any consolation, I'd like to point out that at least we didn't have to watch "Highway to Certain Death," largely concerned with the individual employee's responsibility for avoiding the blind spot of a cement mixer, today or at any threatened point in the immediate future.

Peace, blessings, and workplace safety to all.

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*You will never be able to pay enough to earn what it actually cost me, on a personal level, to get me to use that word... never.
**This also once meant something.

Making Sense of Safety

Today we received little desktop cards listing the “Five Keys to Safe Driving.” There’s a little picture of some car keys on a ring. Guess how many? Keys to safe driving! As in car keys!! Get it?!

The actual keys, however, make no sense at all.

1. Aim High in Steering®

What does this mean? And how exactly would you go about it? It might make sense in an airplane: throttle back, there’s a mountain at 12:00! And it’s already 11:59!

But it doesn’t seem applicable in any way I can think of to driving a car – in fact, I’m pretty sure that remaining earthbound is one of the central tenets of automobile safety.

2. Get the Big Picture®

Consider the global economy. It’s not in very good shape, is it? And the automotive industry, struggling under declining sales, is a significant factor. Well, I don’t want to point fingers or anything, but the fact is that it’s entirely your fault. Look at you, all taking care of your car, changing your oil and rotating your tires and driving responsibly. I bet you even wax the damn thing.

A car will last 100K, 200K miles or even more when properly cared for. What are you trying to pull? Redline it, wear the engine out, maybe put a little sugar in the tank sometimes. Try to get in a wreck now and again. It’s the least you can do.

3. Keep Your Eyes Moving®

What, randomly? When I was learning to drive, the rule was to keep your eyes on the road. Then again, a lot has changed since the 80’s, and nobody can say that’s a bad thing. Bad is the new good, brown is the new black, 50 is the new 30; maybe dangerous is the new safe, I don’t know. So look! There’s a bird! Ooh! Was that a sale sign back there? Hey! There’s Jennifer! Here, let me find a better song on my iPod.

4. Leave Yourself An Out®

Since you stopped maintaining it, you never know when your car might suddenly overheat and explode. So always drive with your seatbelt unfastened and the door slightly ajar. Safety first!

The same principle also applies to relationships.

5. Make Sure They See You®

We can’t all drive the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile, but you could try weaving in and out of traffic, making random sudden stops for no reason, and other attention-getting moves to ensure that other drivers give you a wide berth. Either that or dress like Liberace.

Anyway, these “Five Keys to Safe Driving” were brought to us by our Occupational Safety group, and – not to suggest that I’m prone to hanging on to a grudge – these are the same folks who wouldn’t let me have the snake guy at our safety presentation last December. So I suppose it’s in character for them to distribute safety tips that make no sense at all outside the context of whatever materials they were pulled from.

“Make Sure They See You.” Not if I see them first!

Ready... Aim...

We had a fire drill at work today.

This one was different from the carefree, happy-go-lucky emergency drills I remember from the other job. During this drill, all my coworkers filed out of the building in as orderly a fashion as their bleeding eardrums would allow, then gathered meekly at our designated end of the parking lot to be counted by safety monitors in orange vests, committing only the most minor acts of vandalism on the way.

Cheap American cars and their poorly-mounted side mirrors!

As a wearer of the Sacred Orange Vest, I had advance warning of the fire drill. Only we were told, out of my entire work group, with exhortations of the highest confidentiality, so I thought I was being quite naughty by whispering it to Bill at break. "Oh yeah, they sent an email out to everybody in my division," he said.

He's so hard to impress.

I wore the safety vest, but I did not do the safety dance; perhaps that comes later, after I've worked here a bit longer. I've also been issued a flashlight and earplugs. I could have used those last night at the Stereolab concert. In fact, a full range of personal protective equipment would have been nice.

Don't get me wrong: Stereolab is awesome! But as noted before, getting bumped around in a crowd of your fellow Stereolab fans is virtually indistinguishable from being jostled by David Lee Roth aficionados. And no matter what's coming out of it, you really don't want to be within arm's reach of a 10-foot-tall amp. This, in short, is just too close.

The upside is that my ears were already too stunned to be further distressed by the fire alarm. And I can play the new Stereolab album when I practice my moves for the next fire drill!

I Don't Get Paid to Write This

Okay, my virtual friends, I need some help here.

My coworkers and I planned the October and November safety meetings with great success. In October we did rail safety. We had someone from the Federal Railroad Administration come in and do a presentation on how to stay off the railroad tracks, you dumbass, don't you know there's a train coming?!

Then he gave us all key rings.

In November we did weather hazards. Jim Spencer from KXAN Weather did a presentation how not to get sucked up by tornadoes, struck by lightning, or drowned in floodwaters. One of my coworkers knows him, and he very generously agreed to come and speak for us - at the ungodly hour of 8am, too. Wasn't that nice of him?

All that's left to do is December, and for December I was going to have the snake guy. To recap quickly, the snake guy was going to be really cool, but my supervisor freaked out a little bit and managed to get the Legal Department to refuse to tell us in writing that his presentation (which he gives for elementary schools by the way) didn't constitute a workplace hazard, so we couldn't go ahead with it and now I have nothing. December was supposed to be the best one, too.

I tentatively have "holiday safety" set as the topic. But I'm drawing a blank. I have no one lined up and no ideas here. I'm supposed to have all the information for the official memo to go out by Monday. What do I do?!? Help!!!

I'm so stressed out about it, I had to call in sick.

Not Enough Rats' Asses in Detroit

Well, actually, there probably are.

When I first started working at Crazyland Corpus, I helped a consultant who was working on an assessment for the City of Detroit. They were in the market for a new website design, looking for advice on how better to attract site visitors and convert them, poor saps, into real visitors.

The existing website had links on the home page for residents and business owners in addition to their promotional material. One of the questions in the residents' FAQ, just one step down in the navigation, was "Who do I call to complain about a rat infestation?"

We advised them that this was not Best Practices.*

"Best Practices" was a phrase that got tossed around a lot by our sales staff, i.e. everyone except for the seven or eight peons who actually designed, programmed, or otherwise did stuff. "Industry Best Practices dictate that you should..." we'd begin, then either go on to recommend whatever it was we'd been told to sell that day, or dissuade a client from something that we didn't know how to implement. Once, after I'd worked there a year or so, one of the account managers actually found a definitive list of our Best Practices filed away in a subfolder of a subfolder on one of the network drives. We read them with glee, and forwarded them out to the senior sales consultants we worked under, who had been completely unaware that such a document existed.

What's funny about all this is that I hated that job so much, by the time I left, that I spent much of every day in tears; but I couldn't stop giving rats' asses, handing the damn things out like they were going out of style. I cared that I was on the crazy president's** shit list. I cared that the senior consultant*** I worked with didn't think I could schmooze clients****. I cared that I was giving the web designers***** more work than they could handle. I couldn't quit caring. I couldn't sleep nights.

Work is much less stressful when you don't give a rat's ass, though this is not the solution I'd recommend. (Best Practices dictate you find a job that you can care about, but which won't drive you completely up the wall.)

My guest speaker for the November safety meeting on Monday, a local "personality," verbally confirmed on two separate occasions about a month ago, but has not responded to emails or returned phone calls since. We've already notified attendees to expect him. My boss is panicking.

But I can't find that I really care. I checked out a safety video on the same topic he's supposed to cover, in case he doesn't show up, and notified the panicmonger that we have something to fall back on if the speaker doesn't come. Speakers have no-showed before, and this is just an internal presentation for a handful of construction site workers, to satisfy occupational safety requirements. It's not that big a deal.

"It will be a big disaster if he doesn't show," she wrote back, cc'ing my coworker, who knows the "personality," and who had approached him about speaking at our meeting. "Everyone is expecting him. Everyone is enthusiastic about him. The division head is coming to this meeting. Haven't you heard back from him yet???"

No. It's not a paid engagement; he agreed to do it as a favor. He doesn't owe us this. We've both called; we've both emailed. I guess he's busy. What does she expect us to do, squat down and produce the guy?

I read her email and shrugged. I just don't give a rat's ass. I appear to have run out, and I'm not planning to travel to Detroit to stock up anytime soon. It's not Best Practices.

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*It's "Whom"
**Fired
***Fired
****Mostly quit
*****All quit

Cosmic Harmony

Since we can't have the snake guy, I've been told to come up with a new topic for our December safety information session.

And I’m thinking: you know what? These sessions always deal with immediate physical safety: don’t fall into the path of oncoming 18-wheelers, don’t drink and drive, don’t spray yourself in the eye with caustic chemicals, don’t nap on the railroad tracks, don’t jump up and down on the roof waving a tire iron and screaming insults at the gods during an electrical storm, etc. etc. etc. And pretty much every topic has been covered multiple times already. But how much attention do we pay to the long-term, life- AND quality-of-life-threatening hazards of being out of harmony with our own selves and the world around us?

Except for my small work group, the people who attend these monthly safety sessions are all construction site inspectors and maintenance workers. They are grizzled. They chew tobacco. These guys wear steel-toed boots every day, not to mention belt buckles that cover more territory than some of my skirts. They purchase inner tranquility by the six-pack. I bet most of them can’t even spell “yoga.”

They need my help.

For the December session, I’d like to get someone to come in and speak on the importance of achieving personal balance with the cosmos. This person will dim the lights, put on a little Enya, burn incense, and talk in a gentle, sing-song voice about how to deal holistically with the challenges of day-to-day life. She or he might demonstrate some meditation and breathing techniques, and should also touch on the role of diet in your spiritual, as well as physical health; and how you should only eat local, organic, ethically produced foods.*

Achieving peace in one’s interpersonal relationships is also vitally important to a healthy psyche. Our speaker will give some tips for resolving conflict without violence, shouting, sulking, or withholding sex; and for responding sensitively – while not submissively – to the demands of one’s bosses and coworkers, friends and loved ones.

Our monthly safety meetings often have some freebies for everyone to take home. I’m thinking aromatherapy votives and lavender-scented eye pillows, here.

It’s perfect, don’t you think? Because not only will the session be of great service to the attendees, on a topic that hasn’t already been covered 800 million times, but it’s almost guaranteed that I will never be asked to plan one of these goddamn safety meetings again.

And the balance of the universe is thus restored.

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*Except Smarties™

Careful!

You know your workplace safety meeting has been a rampaging success when someone knocks his iced tea over onto the floor, scattering ice cubes everywhere, while getting up to receive an award. This, in turn, set off a chain reaction wherein I almost slipped and fell in the ice, Robbie nearly brained himself on the monitor hanging low from the ceiling above his chair, and one poor overwhelmed soul set off the alarm trying to get out the emergency exit. Safety first!

3-Martini Break Group alumni Andrew and Bryan now work at the campus where the morning meeting was held, so Robbie and I popped in for a visit afterwards. Bryan's cubicle neighbor had brought in a five-inch-long centipede he'd captured in his bathroom over the weekend. It was confined to a pint-sized terrarium on his desk, and it was Not Amused. It squirmed about restlessly inside, rattling its claws, poking its long, segmented feelers out the air holes on the top, and chittering in arthropodic fury.

Andrew and Bryan seemed uneasy, and I don't blame them. I'm not generally afraid of creepy-crawlies, but the sight of that thing triggered a deep-seated, primal urge to squish it as flat as possible, preferably using somebody else's shoe.

I'm also frightened of the enormous flying cockroaches that buzz around my kitchen late at night, serene in their undisputed dominion. Whacking those bastards with a shoe - anyone's shoe - only stuns them temporarily. I'm sorry, but that's just showing off. If you're able to weather a nuclear holocaust, at least have the courtesy to go "squelch" when you take a size 13 upside the thorax.

And they don't confine their activities to the kitchen, either. Last week one landed on me in bed just as I was nodding off. I don't know how many more times my heart can handle jumping from 65 to 300 beats per minute in the space of .005 seconds, but I'd really rather not find out.

Later Robbie and I had lunch with another 3MBG alum, Thomas, and discovered that the centipede is actually intended for him. For his wife, rather, who's an entomologist, and therefore much less of a weenie than I am. She works as a consultant for a pest-control company, so I was able to get a few pointers on how to deal with my enormous flying cockroach problem.

I think I can pretty much wipe them out by presenting one of them with a safety award.