Don’t Get Pricked
Ice fishermen on the Reflecting Pool? Maybe. Not to put too fine a point on it though, it is April fool’s day eve, if that is even such a day. Tomorrow all the really funny jokes will be played, by the likes of Google, NPR and their ilk, so it is best that I take my own weak stab at humor now, before all the pros move in and spoil it for the rest of us want-to-be comedians. Well, that’s all I’ve got. What do you think, funny ha-ha or just funny looking? Now, I shall switch from trickery to stupidity.
There are too many rules at work. I attended our annual all-hands safety meeting today. I’m an office worker, a cube farmer, where my greatest danger at work is repetitive motion or carpal tunnel syndromes. Many of the newest and IMHO, the stupidest, rules that the company has enacted are safety related. Last year, the company initiated a new safety campaign. It appears that we employees were hurting and killing ourselves with such reckless abandon that it was adversely affecting the bottom line. To counteract this negative monetary trend, new rules have been enacted. For instance, no carnivorous plants are allowed in the workplace. Yes, really, this is no trick. I couldn’t make this stuff up, I’m just not that good. Cactuses with their obvious danger of imminent impalement are also verboten.
The company encourages exercise, because that is a healthy activity and normally helps to lower medical costs, but don’t walk around the plant with your earbuds in. That would be too dangerous. You might not be able to hear the telltale beep-beep-beep of a forklift backing up over you. Frankly, you wouldn’t be able to hear the beep-beep-beep anyway, because the forklift operators had disabled the alarm. They found it annoying. Maybe they had heard the joke too often that your butts so big that when you backup, you go beep-beep-beep? About cellphones or as the British like to say mobile phones, you must be immobile while using a mobile phone. No walking, running (always a problem on company property), biking or driving should ever be attempted while using your mobile phone!
We employees are fragile being, delicate and expensive. Take our healthcare, but not just yet please. We have to ascertain that neither we or our covered spouses smoke. Otherwise, hundreds of extra dollars are tacked onto our health insurance premiums. We don’t smoke, so it is nothing to us, but for smokers it is just another insult. Over a lifetime, smokers actually rack up less medical expenses than non-smokers, because they die so much earlier. They just happen to get sick on the company’s watch. Additionally, we have to submit to an annual mini-physical, where blood work is drawn or pay the price. When the time comes that my boss asks me to turn my head and cough, I am out of there.