Prevent-it Canada has released these television commercials to educate people on workplace dangers.
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On the one hand, you have to admire commercials that are this screwed up. None of that poofy “The more you know!” crap like on American TV. So part of me really admires this. I love how my government knows that, although they can’t balance a budget or negociate trade agreements or do anything worthwhile at all, they can STILL traumatize the s**t outta you. GO CANADA!
On the other hand though, this is just f*****g stupid to the point of being pathetic. “There really are no accidents.” sounds like what the nutjobs with tin foil on their head mutter to themselves. Might as well have said: “There really are no coincidences.”
Look… people have accidents. We all drive too fast, do things without thinking, do things in a hurry. That’s LIFE. Sometimes we get killed for it. It’s an A-C-C-I-D-E-N-T. You can avoid them, sometimes even eliminate the worst case scenarios, but you’ll never ever live in a world without risk. It’s not possible. Not without turning into a nation so balless and soulless that we’ll be paralyzed in fear at the thought of doing anything with even the slightest bit of risk. It’s happening in the U.K. as we speak. Guys can’t do their jobs anymore because they spend half their time putting on safety equipment and double checking every piece of machinery. It’s gotten to the point where a 2 hour job turns into a weeklong endeavor.
If these safety nazis had been in power back in the 1890’s we never would have had the airplane or electricity or the internal combustion engine or the automobile. It would have been too dangerous to work on. Alexander Graham Bell would have had to wear a facemask, full body protection suit, 2 inch thick rubber gloves and a jockstrap just to make his first telephone call. It is ridiculous.
We’re mortal, we die, we get hurt, that’s life. We can become neurotic and insane to the point where we turn into those people that triple check all the locks on their doors before going to bed, or we can do our BEST to be safe while keeping in mind that it’s impossible to be truly 100% safe because even if you’re paranoid as hell and check everything, maybe the other guy didn’t.
Also, just because everything has a cause, doesn’t mean every cause can be eliminated. Working in a factory is loud and repetive. Your mind wanders eventually. There’s just no way you can’t kind of zone off if all you do for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, every week is pile boxes and tape them up. You’ll eventually not notice something because you’re tired and overworked. You’re gonna make a mistake. Nearly all of the time this doesn’t result in anything happening at all, so that makes you even more apathetic so that you make even more mistakes. And once every trillionth mistake… someone dies.
But what I’m trying to say, and what the people who made those commercials refuse to understand, is that no matter how avoidable some accidents can be on paper, they were unavoidable in real life. Because real life isn’t just statistics or cause and effect scenarios. When someone’s tired and overworked and bored and depressed and being pushed to be more productive by their boss, they’re going to make some sort of error in their work eventually. And telling them to be really really careful won’t do a f*****g thing because their minds aren’t on their work but on a myriad of personal problems that you can’t do anything about. Those commercials babble on about personal individual responsibility without thinking that the ultimate reason for some accidents comes from so many different directions that you’d need chaos theory just to keep track of everything.
Some times you have to be Zen about these things and understand that fate can’t be stopped no matter how many yellow safety vests you put on.
But I guess it’s easier just to make a commercial.
