To laugh or not to laugh

Having been actively reading posts on a couple of the social media sites that deal with safety, I have noticed a lot of posts on things that have gone wrong.

As so-called professionals a lot are quick to start laughing and saying they lack sense in making a choice. When there is a workplace incident there is nothing funny about it. Or they jump in and say well if they would have done this or that it would not have happened. What is the old saying hindsight is always 20/20?

Why do we need these types of clips other then to make the person posting them feel they have done a great deed by making fun of someone else’s? Or is that perhaps they know a lot of humans like to laugh at someone’s misfortune but would be terribly upset if it was their misfortune and others made fun of them. Or maybe the person posting it is getting higher regards on their social platform because of the comments or thumbs up emoji.

There is rarely solution offered such as maybe to do some more training. Or should we even say that we have no control over a lot of things. I can say that there are three things in the world I can not control, (1) People, (2) places, and (3) things.

Just maybe instead of all the clips of things that go wrong why not look at ways to help people understand how it could maybe be done a little differently. The world is full of news every day of things that go wrong. Do we really need to make someone a laughing post because of an incident?

I know myself I have made mistakes and have also taken risk. We all have, and we learn from them. We need to continue to learn and the way we do that is sometimes through taking a risk.

I have seen post of people using a knife to cut apples to feed horses and when some one asked about it the (Safety Person) said oh the point is blunt, and the cutting edge is dull. Like a blunt point or a dull knife can not hurt you.

A job site was not allowed to use 1mil cutting disk because they will break and cause damage if not used properly. So rather then train the people on a correct usage we need to take the tool away from them. This stops the problem. I have seen ¼ inch thick blades break, maybe we should take them away. I have seen tires blow out on cars, maybe we should stop making tires they can be dangerous.

We must look at different ways to get the messages across rather then using an incident to laugh at and make fun of someone. There is no value or learnings that will come from doing it that way.

James Parkinson