A while back a friend of mine mailed us all with this classic of overweening health-and-safety bureaucrats gone wild:
The company are now installing wallpaper on our PCs with their 5 golden safety rules:
Always hold the handrail
Always reverse park
Assess Risks
Accept Challenges
Wear PPE [Personal Protective Equipment] gear
We also have to drink from metal cups with plastic lids on them.
The thing that really got me was #2 — ‘always reverse park’. Apparently, someone decided that reversing into the parking space was safer than going in head-first, and to such a significant degree that it was worth mandating it across a medium-sized company. On the other hand, another friend noted:
The college i went to [in the US] would ticket you if you backed into a parking space — they said it was a “fire hazard”.
so we’ve got “fire hazard” in one direction and “unsafe” in the other. Parse that.
Another friend was told that she couldn’t bring her folding bike in the lift because “what would happen if the president was in the lift going to the board room?”. She says “I could not work out the health and safety implications.”
What health and safety insanity have you encountered recently?
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