Not like its been beaten to death around here, but how often do y'all follow all of the proscribed
safety code when working on ladders?
Like, are you the kind of person to climb down off the ladder and insist that your employer go out and rent an articulating lift, rather than kinda just reaching a little
bit further out beyond the ladder footprint to finish the task?
If you mean, what stupid **** was I taught to do like standing on the railings of a single-man Genie without a harness because I was 16 and being exploited by a roadhouse that routinely rolled any hours over 40 into the following week to avoid paying overtime and used high schoolers because they were cheap? Yes, I was once that person.
Now, I know better.
I was on a construction site in Nashville circa 2014 closing out an amphitheater project. Happened to be there for
safety week and was the anointed one from our team to participate in spending all day in the job trailer watching
safety videos with a representative from every contractor on the site. Almost
every single person in that group had watched one of their buddies die on the job because of something entirely preventable. If the ambulance had a jet turbine for an engine and gotten there faster it still wouldn't have mattered. When they told their stories, you could see the trauma in their eyes like it had happened just yesterday when for some of them it was 10-20 years ago. They remember the exact jobsite they were on and the images of their friends and coworkers bleeding on the
ground are still burned into their retinas. Almost always, it was due to slips, trips, and falls.
Do I still occasionally stand on the top of an 8ft ladder? Sure, maybe a couple times a year.
Do I still tempt fate at 25ft off the
ground reaching out to do something that, in my mind, I've convinced myself is going to be much easier one-handed than it actually ends up being. F%%% no.
Safety is a game of odds. Do something stupid once or twice -- you'll probably be fine. Do it over, and over, and over again -- and eventually it will catch up to you. Could be that day you have a headache, could be a loud noise that catches you off-guard, could be a messy break-up on your mind, your kid failed their last test at school, or any number of other things that distracts you for the brief moment
you become the statistic. Maybe you won't die, but you could still be seriously injured in a way that will impact the rest of your career and your life. There is no task, on any particular day, on any particular project, for any particular employer, that is worth that. Unless you happen to work for mountain rescue or the military and putting your life at risk for the potential of saving a thousand over your career is baked into the job description. The entertainment industry isn't saving anyone's lives. If you go down, your legacy gets memorialized in an
OSHA report -- not on a plaque or with a service medal.
