Eish!

Occupational Health and Safety is, ironically, designed to melt the brain.

It is a difficult matter to work on a mine and to stay safe. For one you have to stay sober at all times. Why one would want to stay sober in the dust that is Polokwane or the yellow fog that is Secunda, I have no want for knowing. Hence the elevated risk I guess. The last OHS induction I attended had a 3 minute stint on how to detonate entire hillsides in a safe, efficient and responsible manner followed by a 3 hour diatribe on how not to spend your weekend behind the Spaza gawking at the girls with two heads through the bottom of a home brewed beer bottle. The contrast was noted.

Secunda appears to use ostriches for mine canaries. If an ostrich falls over from asphyxiation, bleeding from the eye-balls, you can rest assured that it’s time to sell up and move out. Even an ostrich knows when it’s beat. They have noses highly attuned to toxic sulphurous emissions. Secunda ostriches do not make good feather dusters.

Speaking of elevated risk, the SHE Officer’s nemesis, though, has to be the humble ladder. A regular risk assessment on its own can take many moons and claim many young, active minds. On a recent mine excursion, we needed to tie a thingamabob to a pole with a cable-tie. I just couldn’t reach. We asked for a ladder and were met with white-eyed fear, a shaking of heads, a wailing and a gnashing of teeth. Ladders, they say, introduce a whole new class of Risk Assessment.

Here are some guidelines for you, the reader, to help you in your bright future of hashing out OHS Plans to ensure the health and safety of your fellow co-workers and to enjoy a long and fulfilled life in the secure knowledge that you have done your best to ensure that your colleagues, although they won’t stay sober, will not invite you to go drinking with them.

1. Don’t fall off ladders
   1. In fact, when in sight of a ladder inform all available colleagues
   2. Run screaming from the building to the nearest flat open surface
   3. Secure yourself to the ground
   4. Without the aid of a two-handed tool
2. Don’t light paraffin infused stogies off of welding torches operated by cerebro-palsic midgets
   1. Avoid midgets in general. This is not really a rule, just a personal preference.
   2. Swing a lead-pipe on scaffolding a find out for yourself why.
3. The ingestion of radioactive materials is your own choice and should strictly only be conducted after hours and off site
   1. In the presence of an adult
4. Don’t eat the yellow snow
   1. Where the huskies go
5. Do not read the entire OHSACT in one sitting
   1. Unless you can’t read
6. Hard hats, no matter how tempting, are not to be used to stage mock bull-fights while waiting for conveyor belts to start up.
   1. It is uncool to wear any hard hat other than regulation white.
   2. This too is not a rule, just a personal preference.
7. Label all your tools.
   1. Screwdrivers should emblazon a bright red “Screwd”, the accepted abbreviation
   2. Hammer Drills, a bright red “HammerD”, for obvious reasons
   3. Do not miss-spell “Pipe Wrench”. It’s plain embarrassing.
8. It’s alright to test your toe-capped boots with a rubber mallet.
   1. Do not assume that your colleagues wear their toe-cap after hours.
9. Make sure your overalls fit properly.
   1. Constriction is the Root Cause of camel-toe
10. Philemon’s Hose Pipe, unlike Occam’s Razor, is an Occupational Hazard.

Best of luck to ye who enter here.