H&S
January 12th 2008 01:29
The photographer entitled this: That Can't Be Safe!
I’ve been using a CD over the last few days to try and get to grips with Adobe InDesign – something I have to do for my job. Very frustrating. I have to flick back and forth between the two screens, and most of the time the thing goes too slow, so you have to give it a little kick to get to the next instruction. However, just when you need it to be clear and slow, it speeds through several instructions at once. And yesterday I found that two of the lessons were repeated!
DVDs and CDs are a good way of learning, because you’re forced to go at their pace (I tend to skim too much when I’m using a manual for basic learning). However they have their limitations too, and I’d always sooner have a hard copy of instructions as well as a CD/DVD.
I just noticed a DVD on ‘Working at Height’. It’s part of a very good site for construction workers, which has a lot of information (from the UK perspective) on health and safety and basic understanding of the routines and so forth. This DVD has a short film showing construction workers the basic principles of working at height, but it also has a CD-ROM with a trainer’s manual, risk assessment guidelines, a flowchart showing the stages involved in planning a job, and a kind of test paper to see if you’ve understood everything you’re supposed to have learned.
I’m not exactly in the construction scene, and the nearest I’ve got to working at height lately is painting the ceiling surrounds on an 8 ft stud. Hardly high, but no doubt you could still do yourself an injury if you tried.
There was a lot of fuss about health and safety people going overboard in the UK while we were living there, and no doubt there’s a way to find a balance. Many people in the UK think that the Health and Safety people have gone too far, and are making modern children sissies, because there’s so much they’re not allowed to do any more.
Still H&S has its place. I’ve climbed up on a chair twice this last week to check something on a top shelf, and the chair, being a revolving one, has happily slid around under me. Without the constant reminders of H&S most of us take even more risks than we should.
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