The Health and Safety Comedy Show

I wasted just over an hour of my life at work today.

It was called Health and Safety training. And I think, in order to pass it with a mark of 80%, all I needed was the IQ of a cat; and before you say it – yes, I know I can be stupid but even I am not that dumb.

The web-based course consisted of watching a few videos and then taking a quiz. I would have passed even if I hadn’t watched the videos – the questions were so simple.

In fact, as I watched it at my desk, with my earphones, I found myself chuckling. In order to illustrate how to be safe and healthy at work, they showed situations with people who had removed their brains and consequently stumbled about the place, driven by their own idiocy.

For example, in one scene, somebody had spilled a small amount of liquid at the top of a staircase. The video showed four people, whose combined IQ must have been less than that of a slug, sliding all over the place in full view of each other.

Idiot number one slipped over as idiot number two approached. As idiot one lay on the floor, idiot two gawped at idiot one and then slipped in the same place and fell down the stairs. At the same time, idiot three was coming up the stairs and when he reached the top having seen the other two idiots slip and fall, he too slipped spectacularly.

I had to answer questions like this:

It is OK to leave you laptop in your car with the window open while you pop into a shop. True or False?


It is OK to climb onto a chair with wheels at the top of a staircase in order to change a light bulb. True or False?

For a laugh, I have decided to publish my own ten point plan for morons as a primer for tests similar to the one I had to take. If you are so stupid that people wonder how you manage to dress yourself in the morning, this is for you.

(1) When making yourself a cup of coffee, do not under any circumstances plunge your hand into boiling water as this may cause pain and severe burning and may stop you carrying on with your work.

(2) Whenever you need to go to the toilet, do not wait at your desk until it is too late. You will wet yourself. Always go to the toilet when you know that you can get there without an accident. Such action minimises the prospect of people slipping in the trail of urine that you leave as you run in a state of panic to the toilet.

(3) Do not throw yourself down the stairs. First of all there may be somebody else coming up and as well as injuring yourself you may injure that person too.

(4) If you work on the first floor or above, do not leave the office by leaping out of the window. Even though this may seem to be the quickest way to exit the building, you will almost certainly injure yourself and anybody who is unfortunate enough to be walking beneath.

(5) If you see a fire, do not stand there pointing at it or attempt to warm up your lunch in the flames. You must leave the building – preferably not by hurling yourself down the stairs or out of the windows, as described above.

(6) Under no circumstances should you pour water into electrical equipment to clean it.

(7) However tempting it may be, do not hit your manager with a blunt instrument.

(8) Do not use your laptop while driving. You may crash the car.

(9) If there is a fire, do not stop to make a coffee because it may be cold outside.

(10) Hitting your colleagues over the head with a laptop will injure them. It may also damage expensive company equipment.

You may chuckle at that list but the training I received assumed that I had no common sense whatsoever.

The whole world has gone mad when it comes to Health and Safety. Here is an example from work; I’ve mentioned this before but this time I thought that photographic evidence was required to show normal people how absurd Health and Safety can be.

This notice is on the mirror in the gents toilet at work.

It’s a good job they told me – my IQ usually plummets when I’m in the toilet and I wouldn’t want to spread germs.

Actually, I had to be very careful taking that photo. Walking into the gents with a camera, no matter how innocent the reason, could have been taken the wrong way.

I hope nobody saw me.

Silly Campaigns (Part Two) - Health and Common Sense

I am certain that at some point in my life I have eaten dirt.

Obviously I was a child at the time – it’s not something I do now – at least not knowingly.

To be honest, I’m surprised that there hasn’t  been a TV campaign urging me NOT to eat dirt. There are TV campaigns to stop me doing everything else that might harm me.

I am not a stupid person, despite being portrayed as such by the media and health and safety experts.  They are not just picking on me, dear reader – they are picking on you too.

We see it every day from crazy health and safety rules and regulations to the news throwing all manner of scare tactics our way.

I’ve told you about a sign in our toilets at work that urges you to wash your hands after using the loo, together with pictures showing you exactly what to do; but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

We have a near miss register – a list of potential issues that could have happened, didn’t and need to be addressed. A person is assigned to each near miss and then action is taken. And it is hilarious reading.

Here are a few examples (I am not making them up):

The condition of the road was very icy and no grit had been put on the road. I approached the barrier very slowly but despite this found I could not stop the car, the car slid slowly toward the barrier and the security guard then came out slowly and lifted the barrier very slowly. I nearly crashed into the barrier.


Walked into kitchen and foot slipped significantly on the floor. It has been recently mopped by the cleaners but they have not put out a wet floor sign and have used a high concentration of multi-purpose fluid in their mop bucket mixture making it very slippery


From where I sit in the office I regularly see near misses where people are rushing out of the kitchen and turning right towards the HR offices with hot drinks and meet someone walking the other way towards my teams area. I think its only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.


Faeces and nose pickings on walls of cubicles of toilets in the offices where staff are working. Reported on 28/11/2006. 29/11/2006 - Reported again: cleaners had not identified and cleaned off. On 30/11/2006, cleaners had still not cleaned the toilets, so reported again, who did get the cubicles cleaned properly after a site visit. To be covered again, at fortnightly H&S meetings on the office facility.


Unwashed Tea Towel has been left for a period of time. This is filthy and I believe may pose a threat to health if used either for drying utensils or use on hands. There are no hand drying facilities in the kitchen. It may sound insignificant but there is a lot of publicity with regards to kitchen germs.


One of the decorative panels behind the urinals fell off. Nobody was using the toilets at the time.

It is worse at some places. Today a work colleague was telling me about his friend who works at another company and has to put up with rules like:

All staff must walk down the stairs holding the handrail. Anybody seeing a person not holding the handrail must report that person. Anybody who knows of a person who did not report another person for not holding the handrail must report the person who didn’t report the first person.

This bizarre rule had a comical effect at a conference in a posh building with one of those staircases that widens into a trumpet shape at the bottom; because the staff were on company business they had to adhere to the above crazy rule. Everybody else marched up the middle of the stairs like the adults they are. The staff of this nameless company all had to hold the handrail and stood out like sore thumbs.

And it gets worse – the same company actually give travelling staff a small handbook which contains instructions in different languages for any taxi driver ferrying the staff member. Instruction like:

The taxi driver must not start the car until the staff member has fastened his safety belt. 


The taxi driver must not smoke in the car. 


The taxi driver must wear a seatbelt. 

That would be pointless in China. In Kunming last year, I jumped into the front of a taxi and tried to fasten my seat belt – the driver refused to drive until I unbuckled my seat belt. I then had to suffer a hair-raising trip around the city of Kunming without a seatbelt.

And what was the reason he had shouted at me for fastening my belt? By fastening my belt I was insulting his driving – implying that I considered him to be a terrible and unsafe driver. No little book would have helped me.

We are being treated like idiots dear reader. They won’t let us use our common sense. We can’t even let our kids outside to get dirty in case they catch some revolting disease.

What they forget is that I have built up an immunity to germs and bugs by actually playing in and with dirt – and I have probably eaten some of it too in my life.

Equally, as adults we are being treated as morons who cannot read and have no common sense. I mean – if I didn’t read the signs they put up I would spend my day with my hands under scalding hot water or picking up dog shit with my bare hands and then eating my sandwiches.

This is my new campaign dear reader.

And I have a big name on my side. I don’t like David Cameron, our new Prime Minister, but I have persuaded him to back my desire to eliminate this inane stupidity.

Read it here.

At least he and I agree on something.

Of course the dates indicate that this was two years ago and he doesn’t actually give me the credit I deserve.

But then again he is politician.

Who's with me?

Health And Safety Gone Mad - AGAIN!

I read in today’s newspaper that the polystyrene floats used at swimming pools to help kids to learn to swim are being targetted by Health and Safety officials because (they say) they may be home to nasty bacteria and are therefore totally unhygienic.

Is it just me or is the world going crazy? Have they never heard of the idea of replacing them every so often?

The article goes on to suggest that if your child drowns as a result of not having a polystyrene float then at least you can be safe in the knowledge that it was in a hygienic environment.

I, along with many others, have considered recent health and safety guidelines to be ridiculously over the top. We can’t do anything these days, for fear of violating some weird safety protocol. I worry about wandering down my own street in case I break my leg on a cracked paving slab. I’m concerned about plugging in an electrical device unless I’ve passed an exam to do so. I’m even scared to get on my soapbox in case I should fall off and injure myself.

It never used to be this way. We could do things without worrying about our own safety. We could get involved in exciting activities without the fear of being sued. We took risks and we accepted them. Reading this article in the paper reminded me of an email I received a few years ago, regarding how things have changed over the years. I was born in 1962 so the contents of the email struck a chord. Here it is:

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 60's, 70's and early 80's probably shouldn't have survived.

Our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint, which was promptly chewed and licked.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans.

When we rode our bikes, we wore no helmets, just flip flops and fluorescent 'spokey dokey's' on our wheels.

As children we would ride in cars with no seatbelts or airbags -riding in the passenger seat was a treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle and it tasted the same.

We ate chips, bread and butter pudding and drank fizzy juice with sugar in, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.

We shared one drink with four friends, from one bottle or can and nbody actually died from this!

We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then went top speed down the hill, only to find we forgot our brakes. After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and could play all day, as long as we were back before it got dark - no one was able to reach us, and nobody minded.

We did not have Play Stations or X-Boxes, no video games at all. No 99 channels on TV, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no DVD's & no internet chat rooms. We had friends - we went outside and found them.

We played elastics and rounders, and sometimes that really hurt!

We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones, but there were no lawsuits!

We had full on fist fights but no prosecution followed from other parents.

We played chap-the door-run-away and were actually afraid of the owners catching us.

We walked to friends' homes.

We also, believe it or not, WALKED to school; we didn't rely on mummy or daddy to drive us to school, which was just round the corner.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls.

We rode our bikes in packs of 7 and wore our coats by only the hood. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of...they actually sided with the law.

I remember as a kid playing British Bulldog, a game involving around thirty kids. All kids would line up on one side of the playground (a concrete playground), apart from one who would stand in the middle facing them. The kids would then charge across to the other side of the playground, with the kid in the middle trying to capture any one of them, usually by wrestling him to the ground. The captured kid would then join the original kid and attempt to capture others on the next charge across the playground. The game would continue, with more and more kids being captured by being tackled onto the concrete until at the end there were only a handful left to charge across. The winner was the last surviving kid, or the kid who got furthest across without being leapt on by the captured kids. It was a great game. Nowadays it has been banned because it is "too dangerous".

We also played a variation of the game in the swimming pool. This game was called sharks and the idea was that the thirty kids would swim from one side of the pool to the other with one in the middle, the shark, trying to capture them by ducking them beneath the water. Once ducked, the kid became a shark and eventually there would be more sharks than kids trying to get across. Again, this was a superb game. It, too, has been banned because it is "too dangerous".

I have never seen any kids badly injured at either game, apart from a few cuts and bruises from being rugby tackled on concrete. In fact, sharks actually helped kids become stronger swimmers. Again, nobody ever drowned and every kid who played the game loved it.

Back to banning polystyrene floats – what next? Will they consider the swimming pools themselves to be unhygienic or dangerous and ban them? I think that there are far too many jobsworths in the world who have absolutely nothing better to do than make life more difficult for the population at large.

I’m adding Health and Safety to the list of things that I am targetting when I take over the world. To Health and Safety officials everywhere: Be afraid! Be very afraid!!