We had a fire drill recently at work, and flunked miserably because the firewarden didn’t have an employee list to check off. The other warden who did know where the list was, was sick.
So, me and another employee suggested a clipboard by the main exit with a list, and that whoever is exiting by that door grab the clipboard and give it to the firewarden. That is it.
First firewarden liked the idea. Manager liked the idea. Went to second (had been sick) warden to say we could work on getting it up next week and was told “again with that damn list. All we have to do is print up a list when we know when the drill is, and it’s fine. We don’t need everybody checking off different lists.”
I tried to explain that no, there wouldn’t be a separate checking off, all the person with the clipboard was to do is give it to the firewarden. No, I was told, that would be redundant. We have a list. An OSH committee member agreed that it’s just redundant, and neither one seemed to understand that no one other than the warden if they needed it would take roll or check anyone off the list. “We have a list, that would be redundant.”
Redundancy is rather the point. Especially since the one they have hasn’t been updated in over a year and nobody knows because only the wardens can see it (I got that from the conversation). If everyone could see the list, we could keep it up to date.
Why can’t people understand that transparency and redundancy in safety systems is a good thing? Especially redundancy. Things can and do frequently go wrong, especially when the emergency is real. If you never engage the redundancy, that’s fantastic. But you’ll be damn lucky you have it it you need it.
If it helps: where I work, there is a sign in the elevator lobby of every floor telling you what floor you’re on and which way all the meeting rooms are.
On the back of that sign is the list. The fire warden or anyone else can grab it on the way out. The plastic cover of the sign becomes the clip board.
I just can’t get over how hostile these people are to the idea,and how they refuse to wrap their heads around the idea that you’re not going to have two people doing checklists, you’re just ensuring that the person who does the checking at least has a list. If they have two and just use their own and ignore the backup, tell me where the harm is.
Because while they are claiming “we have a plan and it works”, clearly it doesn’t. Not when the absence of one person throws it into disarray. It’s like I am accusing them personally, by trying to use an easy (and cheap) solution to help plug a hole, rather than relying on the hope that all the key people are present and not incapacitated when the real thing happens.
And that’s passable(?) for a fire drill, but in the even of an actual fire I’d hate to perish because the printer was out of magenta ink.
Give people a title and it goes to their head.
Tangentially related, one manufacturing plant I worked in had a “Fire Warden” who checked fire extinguishers and who knows what else because during a large RIF, he was some of the low hanging fruit to be picked.
Month later, we had a surprise inspection from the fire department and they knew where all the “problems” were.
Well, I can understand not wanting panic when three people have incomplete lists.
It just occurred to me, though that these people are not very computer savvy (they can do basic stuff, enough to function in an office, but not much more) the idea of redundancies and backups is not as familiar a concept to them as it is to those of us who grew up on “save early and save often”. They’ve also grown up in cities that have largely escaped disaster.
I am… average with computers, but am enough of a data nerd to cry in the event of harddrive failure, and hate having to rebuild everything when a phone gets killed (or at least everything since the last backup). I also grew up in a rural area that saw bad flooding on average four times every year. I have learned that you can’t count on anything going to plan and that shit happens faster than you think. But until you have actually had to deal with more than “just a drill”, sometimes it’s hard to comprehend the reality.
ETA: This is not a value judgement on rural versus urban upbringing, but an observation born from the fact that more isolated areas often spend time cut off from services. Urban areas that have never faced a significant emergency often have nothing but drills which can’t fully simulate the chaos that a real emergency brings. This is why I am cynical about the kinds of drills for emergencies where you can’t trigger a Pavlovian response (fire and evacuation drills work because we react to the bell, not the actual emergency) because people are really, really bad at thinking during the actual event.
Incidentally, thank you for confirming that I am not entirely off-base on this. I know I can think a few degrees off normal at times, and it’s nice to know that I really am not out of my mind and that I didn’t need my head ripped off over this.
Honestly, that was my thought. If all you’re concerned with is passing the test, you’re doing it wrong. Drills aren’t just for fun or show – they’re both a test of how well your system works (and whether you need to plug holes) and they’re a way of ensuring that you don’t have to think. You just do. If the only time you make sure everything is in order t is during a once-yearly scheduled test, then I am officially terrified.
Of course, the warden who said that is also the one who (in a previous drill) mocked me slightly for ensuring I had my keys, jacket, wallet and lunch cooler. She lives half a block from work, I live 35 km away. If there’s a real fire, I want the ability to go home, too. Plus, I can grab all those things, lock my computer and still be the first person out the door, because I’ve practiced and don’t stand around asking questions like “Is this real?”
Okay, it’s official. I am way too stressed out about this. Time to go play stupid games.
So theres a fire everyone gets out the building except the fire warden whos currently booting up the computer, finding the file, opening the file, printing the file and leaving the oh wait they died.
If I go outside to relax, I get hammered with the gorram construction noise. I have a neurological condition where pain can hurt, so I am sick of this pain.
But the world is now one jobsworth the fewer, so that’s possibly a net gain.
Making the survival of people dependent on their planning for their part of disaster fighting could lead to much more robust systems.
For instance, British civil servants used to boast to one another that they had now reached the level at which in event of nuclear war they had a place in a hardened bunker.
I am told (but am not in a position to verify)* that there is a UK bunker where the civil servants and generals will occupy the hardened bottom level.
Unfortunately the vehicles are on the top level and the water storage, aircon and food are on the next level down.
And that’s what a classical education gets you.
The Germans were equally brilliant in WW1. They built special armored bunkers called Stollen to mass troops before an attack. Two small design faults:
Prone to flooding
Too crowded to sleep in so if the attack was cancelled the troops were subjected to shelling as they returned to their lines.
Students chatting in the middle of my lecture, like I’m not standing there doing my god damn job, right in front of them. As if they aren’t there to get an education, but to socialize.
Bonus: Students arguing with me, in front of the class, about their grade. How about come to my office hours to discuss it?
Seriously, it makes me feel like chopped liver… and I know this is much less common for male professors. And in both cases, these were young women disrespecting me.
I think it’s a growing lack of emotional control. I suspect you are right - these people see male professors as having higher status and so are more circumspect, because “that’s how it is”.
As to whether it’s social media that is behind the lack of control, I wouldn’t want to speculate too far. But I guess arguing about grades is better than the experience one of my supervisors had at the U of Austin back in the 1970s. He was on an exchange from the U of Cambridge, which in those days was pretty repressed, and was astonished when a young woman visited his office to tell him how she would reward him for a better grade. At least this issue doesn’t arise if they argue in class.
When I taught high school, I often wished I had designated office hours.
Now that I’m reading what’s happening to profs now, I’m really wishing high school teachers had designated office hours. That way the students would be semi-housetrained when they hit uni.
Is this someone from work, or from the fire department? At first I thought that you meant someone from the fire department or government, but it sounds like you might be referring to an employee. (UK/US difference, I presume.)
Businesses where I worked had customers, clients, job applicants, employees, etc. in and out so a checklist that didn’t include them wouldn’t be of much use. But in a place where it made sense (and where you could flunk for not having it), it should absolutely be accessible to more than one person. In fact, you should flunk if it is only accessible to one person. Any emergency plan that relies totally on one person is a bad plan.
One problem with Pavlovian response drills is that, after a few false alarm drills, the ‘boy who cried wolf’ effect sets in. They effectively condition people to believe that there is not an emergency, which is the exact opposite of what is intended.
