It became such an important issue for me that later in my career, when I had a team of about 80 people, I didn’t let a meeting go by without some discussion about safety and the importance of challenging each other over potentially unsafe behavior. One day I began talking about the cost of an accident and one of my people told me he thought that maybe that’s what I was concerned about, saving money. I replied that regardless of what you think of my intent, I offer every employee the opportunity to stop doing work they consider unsafe until we can mutually resolve the issue. How can that be a bad thing?

So at the risk of being all about the money, I recognize that sometimes saving a few bucks is a good motivator for folks. Here are a few ways in which safety can save you money!

1. Practicing good methods around the house with knives, ladders, electricity and stairs can almost guarantee a much smaller chance of heading to the emergency room for a related accident. And under no current or emerging health plan would that be an economical chance to take.
2. Keeping things clean and clutter free not only enhances the value of your home, but reduces the chance of injury and again, those same ER visits.
3. Speaking of clutter, those partially used gallons of paint from all the projects you’ve done over the years could be a problem waiting to happen. Every year or so, someone in your area is having a free disposal day for items just like that. No cost to get rid of them, and no extra fuel for fire or explosion.
4. You know that wobbly old step ladder you got from your grandparents’ house when your father helped them move to a smaller place? It might be the most expensive free thing you have in your house. Throw it away and buy a new one. Yes, this is going to cost you, but think of it as cost avoidance.
5. Have a pest problem in your home? Hire a professional to take care of it. Again, this may sound like a cost, but when you start trying to handle this yourself you are starting by treating the symptom. You may not know where the nest or hive or burrow is. I watched a neighbor go after a hornet’s nest with a power washer one summer evening. It was hanging from a second story eave, just out of reach of the stream, so he imrpovised methods of positioning himself higher. He didn’t get stung at all, but he came so close to falling from the fence he was perched on and it would not have been a minor injury. He was lucky.
6. I know you’ve heard this before, but check tire wear and inflation on all your vehicles regularly. Change those tires before they fail. Don’t wait until the day after the big rain storm when you lost control of the vehicle, do it now.

Safety, like quality, is free. Every dollar spent, along with the right discipline, will save you much more in the long run.

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there!

Anna at abdpbt is responsible for the effort to Fight Listless Mondays. Find other list links on her blog. Her lists and the others linked there always give you something to think about, and may even make you smile!

Before I moved to the Atlanta area, I connected in ATL dozens of times. You don’t even have to travel to or from the south to still find your way to the Atlanta airport as part of your trip. I met a passenger the other day who started her morning in Jackson, MS and was trying to get to Omaha. While it might seem logical that she was in Atlanta at that point, she got there by way of Memphis, and from Atlanta was headed to Milwaukee. Obviously, this is not the path from her original ticket, but once her first leg of the trip got disrupted it went downhill.

Yesterday I was heading to Milwaukee via commuter plane to catch a flight home. We were a little late pulling away from the gate when the attendant informed us that we still had to go through de-icing, and so some of our connections were in jeopardy. Almost everyone on this flight was connecting to somewhere else, and there was this collective groan that emerged with the announcement. It was a groan of discontent. I heard the person behind me ask his row mate, “Do you think that’s really necessary?”.

It was sort of painful to walk up to the gate in Milwaukee and see the jetway pulled away from my Atlanta-bound flight, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes.

When I buy a ticket, or when my company buys me a ticket, the money spent isn’t just for transportation from point A to point B. I am paying for the gate agents, the airport gate fees, the maintenance of the plane, the luggage handlers, and most importantly, the experienced experts who make the calls regarding the safety of a flight. In a weather situation like yesterday’s, I pay them to make the decision to de-ice, even though it will create scheduling ripples throughout their system. They don’t want to delay flights, but they don’t want disaster either. I sincerely believe that if the people on the plane yesterday could vote on the de-icing process, I would have been on the short end of the vote.

On the other hand, why the airline books tickets with a 25 minute connection, in Wisconsin, in February, is beyond me. The boarding process is underway before you even get there.

Do you have a peeve about safety practices that you believe don’t protect you? Would you want to put plane de-icing up to a vote?  Not me, thanks.

The words rang true for me today: Let’s be careful out there!

Luck is a funny thing. We use the terms good luck and bad luck to signify opposite concepts, but when we use the term “lucky” it is always with the connotation of having good luck. Like when Dirty Harry said to the punk, “you have to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ “.  But are we either lucky or unlucky?

Today I offer a list of things that have remote odds of happening, yet if they do it is usually attributed to good luck or bad luck.

1. Winning a big lottery, like Powerball or Mega Millions. You initiate your luck by buying the ticket first.
2. Having a cancer detected early while still treatable. You have to be proactive with your health.
3. Winning American Idol. You have to have the talent, you have to audition, and you have to outperform (for the most part anyway) all the other contestants.
4. Getting struck by lightning. Your home getting struck by lightning. I knew someone who had that happen. That’s just plain bad luck.
5. Having really bad weather on a day where it is very inconvenient to have bad weather. Your wedding, for example. You can have a plan B, but it still feels like bad luck. My parents were married in Cleveland in the first week of January. It was in the 60’s that day. Good luck I guess.
6. Having a tire go flat on your way to somewhere important like a job interview, a final exam, an appointment you have already had to re-schedule three times. Bad luck, unless of course you knew the tire was low and you had been having problems with it. Then it’s just bad planning.
7. Being in a 1960 Chevy with 8 other kids one night when a driver plows into you from behind at a stoplight. Actually, possibly another case of good luck. Everyone walked away uninjured, probably because we were so tightly packed in there.
8. Getting invited to Tiger Wood’s Apology Conference.

We use “luck” to explain the long-odds outcome, or the unexplainable. But you can’t count on luck. In most bad-luck scenarios, you can look at them afterward and identify the one or two things you could have done differently to avoid the unlucky outcome. Or the things you did that paved the way for luck.

Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya?

Anna at abdpbt is responsible for the effort to Fight Listless Mondays. Find other list links on her blog. Her lists and the others linked there always give you something to think about, and may even make you smile!

Last weekend, as part of my first 20,000 days celebration, I ran my second half marathon. In spite of my September post on preparation, I did not prepare to the degree I had planned. So here’s what you do to make sure you have a good time, a good race, and no injury.

1. Set your expectations to match your level of training. If you are running a longer race, but haven’t come close in your long runs, be prepared to walk part of the way. You can run the whole thing with the right level of mental toughness, but your risk of injury increases if you exceed your training by too much.
2. Follow a practical pre-race ritual. This is different for everyone, based in part on your travel to the race location. Some nutrition to start your engine is a good idea, but most runners don’t want to have too much in their stomachs at the start of the race. Get to the race with enough time to register and pick up your number (unless there was pick-up available the day before). Check for the porta-pottys. If you need to use one, chances are they will be busy just before the race, so line up early.
3. Position yourself in a reasonable location at the start. Don’t put other runners in the position of having to run around you in the early running. And don’t put yourself so deep in the pack that you don’t have room to run.
4. The longer the race, the more careful you pace. Don’t start out at your best stride when the race is much longer than your usual run. If you routinely run 5k in 25 minutes, then by all means go out fast and back off a bit if you need to. But if you are an 11-minute miler running a 10k, don’t rush out at a 9 minute pace and expect you will keep it up.
5. Remember the words of my friend John: “To finish is to win”. You trained, you registered, you got to the start. Now get to the finish and don’t worry about your time.
6. Enjoy the rest of your day. If you ran a long race you may want to ice the legs a bit, even in an ice bath. This will reduce the recovery time.
7. Pick another race and set up a new training plan!

I know that I was not happy with my last finish time, but thrilled with the run itself and that I finished without injury. But I know what I need to do to improve and I’ll run my own 13.1 in May with a new goal. Assuming I train enough.

Enjoy your training as much as your racing, and, as always, let’s be careful out there.

Anna at abdpbt is responsible for the effort to Fight Listless Mondays. Find other list links on her blog. Her lists and the others linked there always give you something to think about, and may even make you smile!

This morning we took a walk along the beach in the picture here, and a lone surfer was enjoying mild wave action. Later in the day, around lunchtime, this beach was very crowded. As we enjoyed a lunch in a little cafe overlooking the beach, we witnessed a mild commotion as a gentleman was pulled from the water with obvious head injuries. He did not have a surf or boogie board, he was simply pounded by the waves into a rough interaction with the sand.

There were warning flags along the beach that the surf was dangerous and you should not body surf, but people were diving into waves that were easily 6-8 feet. It looked like fun. Not huge waves, but big enough to bring on the hurt.

While we were at the same cafe, we noticed the family sitting nearby that included a child, about 4 years old, with curly red hair and fair skin. And sun poisoning. He had cream on his face, his eyes were nearly swollen shut, and they had a tube of SPF50 sitting on the table. I’m not throwing stones here, I did the same thing with one of my kids, and that’s why I would have prepared differently.

So while it is a long way from time to worry about surf and intense sun for many of my North American friends, its worth noting that safety is always a consideration. Being careful out there is a 24/7 concern.

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there.

Here are the tools I have seen mis-used the most in my life.

1. Screwdrivers – This simple tool is designed to translate force to rotate screws into and out of materials. there are several types, the most common being the phillips head and the slotted or regular. We use them as a pry bar, especially to open paint cans or put a bike tire on its rim. Not a good idea. At times we use them for the right thing, but we hold the object we are working on in a way that when the screwdriver slips, we could get a cut or even a puncture wound. Ouch!
2. Hammers – One person I know calls a hammer a “16 ounce wrench” because he uses a hammer to adjust things – to beat them into submission. Again, we use this tool mostly for what it was designed for, but many people don’t take the time to don even an inexpensive pair of safety glasses to provide protection from flying nails or materials that chip when they are hit.
3. Pliers, Channel-lock pliers, and any adjustable wrench. These tools are great, but their misuse can lead to aggravation. The biggest problem is using these tools for working with nuts and bolts. Anything other than socket wrenches, open-end wrenches or box wrenches used on a bolt head will compromise the geometry, making it harder to ever use the correct tool and creating sharp burrs. They also are prone to slipping, which leads to knuckle injuries.
4. Kitchen knives – When used to open that UPS package or as a pry bar to get those AA batteries loose from the remote, you are damaging the integrity of the blade, and making it less reliable when called upon to do the work you have it for. And that is when the knife slips off the green pepper and into your finger.
5. Scissors – Do you have one of those drawers in your house that is the repository for miscellaneous tools? I’ll bet the scissors in there are the most mis-used tool in the drawer. Mostly because they are used so frequently that they end up becoming the easiest thing to grab. Generally mis-used the same way a knife is. Here, the danger is in how we handle them when we start using them for alternative purposes.

Getting the right tool for the job is critical. Using it correctly is just as important. Do you have an experience where you didn’t think about the misuse of a tool until an accident happened? Let us all know about it, you might save us from injury.

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there.

Anna at abdpbt is responsible for the effort to Fight Listless Mondays. Find other list links on her blog. Her lists and the others linked there always give you something to think about, and may even make you smile!

I’ve lived in places that routinely get weather like this, but Atlanta gets it so infrequently that people don’t get a chance to develop the skills to drive when conditions are icy. More importantly, we don’t work on the skill of deciding not to drive. I saw several interviews on the news with drivers who thought they could handle it, but they were wrong.

Many smart people of science have made great discoveries about how consistently the world works, and if we take the time to understand the rules they have discovered, we could save ourselves from life-threatening accidents. Because, you see, you can hardly call them accidents when nature is performing as predicted.

1. Gravity works, always. The exact rate of acceleration that the earth’s gravity is responsible for (9.8 meters per second squared) doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is relentless. The farther away you take yourself from a stable, level surface, the greater will be your speed at impact with the next surface between you and the earth. Climbing a ladder without setting it up correctly, or getting on a roof without the right kind of harness or other safety precaution, or just jumping on a trampoline without spotters are all activities that people insist upon as though gravity won’t be a nuisance to them.
2. Machines can multiply forces. Why is this important? Think about your car. If you are old enough to have driven a car that didn’t have power steering, you know that having two hands on the wheel was necessary at all times. Your car wants to travel in a straight line. When you turn the wheel, even a little bit, your front wheels dig into the pavement with tremendous force to move the car into another direction. But power brakes and steering make us feel like those forces are minimal. So when I heard a driver say he though he could handle the icy hill, he was totally neglecting the fact that without the tires biting into the pavement, no steering matters, the car wants to go in a straight line. The center of the car. It may start to fishtail a bit and move sideways, but the center is moving straight, and no amount of steering is going to change how the tires behave on ice.

So that’s it. Ice is not asphalt, and gravity never quits.

Any simple science lessons you have encountered that help you be safer?

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there.

Anna at abdpbt is responsible for the effort to Fight Listless Mondays. Find other list links on her blog. Her lists and the others linked there always give you something to think about, and may even make you smile!

I play instruments. Keyboard and guitar primarily. Loss of even one part of one finger changes everything. But even day-to-day living is challenged by the loss of a small part of your hand, and loss by accident can be avoidable. There are things we can do to increase the likelihood that we will avoid injury to those precious digits.

1. Protect them in the cold. Keep you hands in your pockets, wear gloves, just take precautions in cold weather. Frostbite is nasty.
2. If your work is tough on your hands, wear protective gloves. The exact glove you need depends on the task at hand (oops, sorry for the pun!) but your hand can be protected while you manage many hand-intensive tasks.
3. Good grooming. Keep your nails trimmed and avoid picking at cuticles or biting your nails. Very bad habits as they can lead to infection.
4. Don’t reach in! A good friend tried to unclog his snow blower after the engine was shut off. Unfortunately there was some stored energy in the impeller system and he lost some fingers. Ouch.
5. Don’t multitask when using a knife. Cutting vegetables, trimming meat, or whatever you do with a knife requires concentration. If you can’t focus on the task, put the knife down.

Do you have a particular hobby that requires unique protection? Let us know what steps you take.

Anna at abdpbt is responsible for the effort to Fight Listless Mondays. Find other list links on her blog. Her lists and the others linked there always give you something to think about, and may even make you smile!

When there are special events in your home, work patterns change. In particular, there is more time spent in the kitchen preparing, serving, eating and cleaning. The kitchen is full of opportunities for injury, mostly from heat. And those hazards are not just near the stove and the oven. We carry hot pans across a room, or hot soups or teas are carried. The potential for burns is much higher.

Then there are the knives that find their way into a soapy sink. If someone isn’t careful reaching in, they could easily get cut.

This advice seems a little bit late, right?

This is also the time of year when many of us make promises to do things differently. Eat better, exercise more, save more diligently, and to get things into better order. These kinds of resolutions present changes in our day-to-day workflow. The process of how we go about moving through our daily lives. And while change is good, it is also good to look for any potential hazards related to your new plans.

For example, if you are going to rise early to exercise every morning, make sure you are starting with a glass of water and a light snack. Even a small amount of yogurt or a slice of peanut butter toast can effectively help you get through a workout better. Sounds simple, but it is important.

Also related to exercise – if you haven’t been good about it recently, then ease back in. Take time to warm up, stretch, and cool down to minimize the liklihood of injury.

Plan your food intake. If you plan on eating better, don’t just go to the grocery store and buy only fresh produce and things you think are healthy. If you are not already including them in your diet, then it may take you time to get used to bringing them back, and some could easily spoil before you have a chance to consume them all.

Will you be driving at a different time because you will be heading to the gym before or after work? There may be different traffic patterns at that time of day that will require a change in how you drive. It may require more patience, or you may be driving in darker conditions than you are used to.

And don’t forget – lots of other people make decisions to exercise more, and so there will be more runners on the road. They may not be wearing adequate reflective clothing, so watch out for them!

Whatever changes you are planning, I wish you luck in achieving your new goals.

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there.

SaferByChoice is all about that idea. That if we equip people to make the best decisions, we will all be safer. As a result, everyone is better off. Employees are not compromised, and the business runs with less interruption.

I am traveling this week, and awoke this morning to see the scene you see with this post. Not the worst snowstorm of all time, and not a bad one by many standards. But the roads were not clear, my rental was a small, rear-wheel drive car, and the news reporters said local police were asking that non-essential travel be delayed.

Less than 10 years ago I would have convinced myself to get out there, clear the snow off the car, and get to the office. Today I thought about it for a bit, then I realized that I had all I needed on my PC, I had a good wireless connection, and I had a phone. That pretty much meant that my travel was non-essential. I had the face-to-face meetings that I came here for scheduled on Tuesday and Thursday, so there was no reason to rush to the local office today.

If there were someone expecting me in the office today, I believe I would have made the same decision. I am obligated to make good decisions for my company. Good business decisions, good quality decisions, good HR decisions, good safety decisions. I probably could handle the risks associated in driving in blowing snow, on roads that are not completely clean, but I don’t have to. Truth is, if I had an accident, I would be saying that I never should have gone out.

So instead, I was more productive than usual today. No travel time, no one stopping by the office to chat. and for an INTP like me, that makes for a great day!

Are you obligated to be safe? Do you compromise that obligation? What are you going to do about it?

Thanks, and let’s be careful out there.