| TED SPEAKS...ABOUT THE WORKPLACE |
| THE AIR, THE FROGS, AND OTHER THINGS |
Remember anthrax? You know...that lethal powder that began circulating through the mail shortly after 9/11? Claimed a number of lives, had people damn near scared to death. Yeah, THAT anthrax! Well, here’s one insider’s account of what went on in the trenches during the crisis, and of a subtler, friendlier menace that didn’t make the news. I won’t mention my place of work, except to say that my colleagues and I were in the hotspot of activity at the time. We were the unsung heroes in aprons and baseball caps who worked around the clock to keep that demon substance at bay, lest it infect any more victims. It was on account of brave, highly trained personnel like us, that innocent folks like you could sleep peacefully at night. Or so we’d like to believe. Happily, we had no casualties at our local facility, not even a close encounter with the Big A. Fact is, we were so busy keeping ourselves busy, fear never entered the equation.
Management showered us with memorandums, literature, videos and safety talks. Most of this information we’d already learned from television and newspapers. Nevertheless, for those too simple to fully grasp the situation, management dispatched two bright BD-BOP’s (Big Deal Bosses of Operational Protocol) from our mother office to brief us all over again about the disease...and, essentially, regurgitate what they themselves had probably just learned the other day. Worker safety, our leaders assured us, was their primary concern. So much so, they gave us protective gloves and face masks—shipped them in by the thousands—which we were encouraged, but not required, to use.
Judging from the off-handed manner in which most of the workers treated their gear, I’d say risk of infection wasn’t foremost on their minds. They wore the masks more out of duty than caution, at least in the beginning, even though they were as good as useless against the disease. Our tour superintendent admitted as much during one of our informational group sessions. The crude face protectors management had ordered might keep dust and common airborne crap from invading your throat and sinuses, which was reason enough to wear one, especially if you had allergies. But they were too coarse to filter out the ultra-fine anthrax particles. Big deal, huh! "However, if wearing a face mask makes you feel better,” he said, “then by all means wear one."
I don’t know about you, but playing “Pretend” has never made me feel better. People used the blame things anyway, as the spirit moved them. Heck, they were free. Whipping them on and off, I suppose, gave them something to do. After about a month, the novelty wore off, and they all but disappeared—the masks, I mean, not the people.
The nitrile gloves, I should point out, can and do provide real protection, and are still in use today. Of course, they’re not worth a damn if people aren’t consistent in how they use them. Whatever danger of contamination prompts someone to don these gloves in the first place, doesn’t cease to exist the moment he peels them off and clocks out for lunch. Am I right? Suppose he handled a toxic substance an hour ago. What happens when he or someone else comes in contact with those now-contaminated gloves he left lying about in the open? People did careless stuff like that all the time.
How about a person’s clothes—did anyone think of that? Could someone possibly carry that contamination home with him? What about his car? Could his contaminated clothes or shoes infect the upholstery? Could he infect his spouse when she goes to hug him? Or his children? Should one wear protective overalls on the job? And if so, how does one safely cleanse them, or dispose of them, or isolate them? Shall I go on?
Here's a doozie of a question that a buddy of mine brought before the two BD-BOP’s. Does warm water and soap actually KILL the anthrax toxin? Or does it simply flush the active virus down the drain, where it will reside indefinitely and infect the next person who uses the sink?...or run its course to the ocean and poison the fish and kill everybody who eats them? In other words, does the rite of hand washing exorcize the contamination as thoroughly as the rule book would have us believe?
You could have driven a truck through the silence. Grunts and murmurs rippled through the assembly. Our learned counselors went blank. Nothing in their vast repository of recycled information had prepared them for this question. It wasn’t in their script. They hemmed and fidgeted and finally said: "Uhhhh...we'll have to get back to you on that." Which, in workplace jargon, usually means: "Discussion’s over!" Ten years later, those guys still haven’t gotten back to us. Not that anyone with sense turns blue waiting for an answer around here.
In short, these props and prescribed safety measures did little more than clear management’s conscience, and give workers a series of half-assed, feel-good routines to perform, however ineffectual they might have proven in an actual crisis. Blind compliance is that proverbial binky people drag around with them to ward off those forces they cannot master or comprehend. Like nightmares or boogeymen. Like having to think for themselves.
Now here’s where the plot thickens—or sickens, as the case may be. A few months before the anthrax crisis, these same high priests of workplace safety had upheld a recent directive BANNING the use of gloves on our high-speed processing equipment. Pray tell, why? Apparently ONE worker, in ONE facility somewhere in the country, had gotten her glove caught in the feed mechanism and injured her finger. Ergo, wearing gloves while working on the machine was declared unsafe.
Consider the implications. If somebody slips in the restroom and busts his head on the urinal, does that suddenly make taking a leak a "dangerous activity?" Should workers be required to wear helmets every time they go to the potty? You see where one can go with this?
Now, I don’t use gloves on the job, never liked them, so the directive didn’t bother me. But there are plenty of sound reasons why people would want to protect their hands while working. Most of my colleagues were accustomed to wearing either the conventional canvas work gloves, or those thin latex ones (the kind the doctor slips on his hand when he tells you to drop your drawers and...um, you know). Not surprisingly, the ban on gloves didn’t go over very big, especially among the ladies, who preferred keeping their cat paws smooth and uncalloused.
Once anthrax began rearing its ugly head in the workplace, the question, quite naturally, was raised: Could we at least wear those special nitrile gloves on the machine? I mean, duh, doesn’t viral contamination pose a far more serious threat than catching one's gloved finger in the feed mechanism? The Paternal Institute of Safety Specialists (PISS) called a special emergency session to review the situation. And, in their inscrutable wisdom, they concluded that saving fingers took precedence over saving lives.
Surprised? If you don't believe it, just read the newspapers. Digital dismemberment is fast becoming the newest threat to our national security. In this "Land of the Sparse Handshake," a day doesn't go by that you don't hear of somebody losing his finger in a machine. Winning team members have taken to giving each other “high fours.” Just the other day, while driving to work, I inadvertently cut out in front of another car, whereupon the driver honked his horn and flashed me...his knuckle! I tell you, we have an epidemic on our hands! Who's to blame? It's hard to point a finger at anyone. Were you to count every digit in America and divide by ten, chances are you'd end up with a partial person. But I digress...
After much debate and deliberation, the exalted COW (Council of Wisemen) graciously conceded on one point. They ruled it was safe to wear gloves when clearing the mail stackers, but NOT when loading the machine. This being a two-person operation, these Lords of Logic (LOL) thought this was a more equitable distribution of danger. After all, what good are work gloves if employees are missing their fingers? How pointless! On the other hand, if people protect themselves only when it’s safe and convenient to do so, the gloves will miraculously eradicate any contamination they may have picked up while working unprotected. Makes about as much sense as another popular religious practice: Sin freely on one end of the proverbial machine, seek absolution on the other.
But wait, it gets better. Why was every wall fan in our plant unplugged? Because some high ranking, card-carrying cuckoo-head from COW or PISS had decreed that all oscillating fans be disabled—get this—to avoid blowing any possible anthrax particles into the environment.
Hell's bells! Was there no relief from the stifling misery in this building? We needed a ban on wall fans like another hole in our heads. I tell you, there are more excuses for keeping the workplace uncomfortable than are dreamt of in your philosophy. As it was, maintenance had the thermostat set on 102 . That’s what it felt like to me. It was hot in Summer because their so-called “cooling unit” hardly ever cut on, and didn’t “cool” worth a damn when it did. It was hot in Winter because the central heat ran constantly. And unlike the illusory relief we received in Summer, the heat in Winter was real. Now, how d'ya figure it was safe to blow air out of the ceiling ducts, warm air mostly, but not safe to turn on a fan to help cool a hot, sweaty slob like me?
Even before the fan-ban, I would ask Maintenance: Couldn’t you PLEASE make the building cooler? The response as always the same: "People complained it was too cold in here." You’d think we were stationed in Anchorage or Duluth, the way everyone had this pathological fear of freezing the death. Like they couldn’t work hard enough to generate their own warmth, the custodian had to incubate the workplace to keep them from sticking together with frost. Talk about wasting energy! A person was more likely to die of heat stroke than to contract anthrax.
Sometimes I’d joke about how management was trying to downsize the work force by incinerating everybody. Not all at once, of course, but gradually, inconspicuously over time. I heard that if you toss a frog into a pot of boiling water, he'll leap out and save himself. But place him in a pot of cold water and turn up the heat ever so slowly, and the frog will eventually perish without ever realizing it. This, in a fanciful nutshell, was how I envisioned this whole environmental charade. There were days when I was so deliriously hot, I began to imagine the climate controls had been rigged, and that I alone was conscious of our impending doom. I felt like a fungus in a jar sizzling atop a radiator, clothes sticking to my body, t-shirt soaked and crusted with brine, sweat rolling down my face, stinging my eyes so, I could hardly see...while others went about in parkas and sweatshirts. I’d sense, not only my own heat, but everyone else’s heat filling the air, all that stale, unventilated muck hanging in the atmosphere like a smog, cooking us like frogs in our own juices.
I submit, it’s not what goes into our bodies that infects the workplace; it’s what comes out of us. It’s not the cold air making people sick. Rather, it’s the steady diet of HOT AIR from their mouths, their minds, their leaders—and other orifices which I won't mention in polite company—that keeps them stewing in this cauldron of lies, misinformation, ignorance and deceit, unaware of the poison that’s slowly working its spell.
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