“I Am Invincible” Part 2 – 04/20/2020

“I Am Invincible” Part 2

For several weeks now, all we’ve heard about is how we need to do everything we can to stay away from one another to flatten the COVID-19 curve.As I mentioned last week, it seems to be working.

Working so well that this past week, we started to hear about how our government is looking to get things rolling again.

Although we are being warned that this will be a slow process, anything that allows us to begin to get back to our normal lives and get people back to work is good news.

Who would have thought back at the beginning of the year that a virus could bring the world economy to a screeching halt?

I would have never believed it, but the COVID-19 virus did just that.

Over the years we’ve seen thousands of lives taken from the various flu viruses, but very few us get too concerned about it since we’ve got a shot that will protect most of us.

In fact, many of us had gotten to the point where we assumed that our medical researchers would always be ahead of any virus that could threaten us.

Maybe we had even gotten to the point where we felt we are invincible.

Here’s a Safety E-QuickTip from 2011 that may say it best.

I was thinking about what runs through our minds when it comes to workplace safety and a quote from the James Bond movie, Golden Eye, came to mind, “I am invincible.”

If you’ve not seen it, early in the movie a computer tech by the name of Boris shows how superior he is with computers and then says, “I am invincible.” Throughout the movie you are reminded time and time again, mostly by his actions, how Boris is invincible.

As the movie draws to a close, Boris (who is one of the bad guys) emerges surrounded by a burning heap of scrap metal to say, “I am invincible.” Then as he holds his hands high, a piece of the scrap metal hits a row of liquid nitrogen tanks that break open and Boris is completely engulfed, leaving him frozen in time.

For many of us, we have experienced what is referred to in the safety industry as near miss situations – where if things would have been just a little different, we could have been seriously injured or even killed. As these experiences grow in number, we may even begin to think, “I am invincible.”

During that same time, we may have also heard about others who were not so lucky. Things went wrong and instead of a near miss situation, they were involved in an accident and they were seriously injured or even killed.

Much like Boris in the James Bond movie, we look at those accidents and we find ways to justify in our minds that this never could have happened to us. We believe we never would put ourselves in that type of situation or make that kind of a mistake because we are smarter than that.

If this sounds a little like you, I hope that you will take a moment before work each day to remember that you are not invincible. Make a conscious effort to work safely to help ensure that you and your co-workers go home at the end of the day with all the same working body parts that you came with.

Please remember in the upcoming weeks to listen to the experts and follow their directions as they begin to get us back to our regular everyday lives.Your life and the lives of others are depending on it.

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Thanks for Reading and Please – Stay Healthy, Stay at Home When You Can, and/or Work Safe This Week