Getting Wet at Work

Cleaning my office this weekend, I found this old picture and thought about the incident that made me get fully clothed into a safety shower at work.

The short version...Telling wasn't enough. Showing dramatically was necessary.

When I was a department manager, we had a chemical accident and the person who got spattered didn't use the safety shower like we'd trained on over and over. He consequentially got burned much more badly than he should have.

We held shift meetings to discuss the incident and asked people if they'd use the showers now. Silence. Finally, someone piped up "I hear the water's black from sitting in the pipes so long." A few heads nodding.

"And I'll bet it's REALLY COLD." someone added. Lots of heads nodding now.

We tried to reassure people that these were not true, but you could see the skeptical looks on their faces. No way would they ever use them. Time for Plan B.

We organized a department Safety Day where we broke the shifts into small groups and held lots of interesting demonstrations on a variety of topics. My assistant manager and I ran the one on the production area safety equipment and the coup de grace was getting ourselves dosed with the shower.

People's jaws dropped when one of us walked under it and pulled the handle getting thoroughly soaked. Clean, room temperature water.

Class dismissed!