On the one hand, shock is an effective attention getter - and I do tend to believe that a lot of PSA messages get ‘lost in the clutter.’ So, doing something, anything, different to get attention, and make people think should be considered to have merit.
On the other hand, I can’t help remembering the story (urban legend?) about the company that had had a hugely successful safety program… until the director of the safety program choose a particularly gruesome/shocking presentation for that year’s training. And the audience reactions were so visceral that several people injured themselves getting out of the room where the training film was being shown.
I haven’t checked the link, yet, in the OP. I’m not sure I’m going to, either. It sounds a lot over the top, to me. But, I like a lot of the other ‘shocking’ ones mentioned in this thread. I think it’s just the gore factor that’s bothering me, rather than the overall logic of the PSA, itself.
So do I. I can certainly appreciate the message–heck, I use appropriate safety gear and procedures for doing handyman stuff around the house. But I wonder if this is just too graphic–so graphic that its mssage is lost in the horror, and viewers will change the channel when they see it starting.
There was another great Canadian safety PSA a number of years ago, probably about the time Ontario brought in a mandatory seat belt law. It argued against the idea that if one isn’t wearing a seat belt, one can be safely thrown clear of a car crash, and it did so by heaving big fruits and vegetables at objects. Pumpkins, watermelons, and so on would be shown flying through the air in slow motion before splatting on the road, smashing into lamp posts, and so on. It was humorous watching fruits and vegetables go “splat”; but more importantly, it got the message out there effectively. I wonder if this PSA could have been more like that one; humorous but effective, instead of something where the message seems lost in the graphic images and that I’m likely to change channels away from.
There is a large sign on the street corner near our apartment, a PSA for fire safety. It reads “Regardez-moi. Le feu brûle des vies” ( Look at me. Fire burns lives). It’s a very close-up image of a woman with severe scarring and facial deformation due to a burn injury. Effective, I suppose, but disturbing as well. What makes it weird is if you saw this woman in a restaurant or on the bus, you’d be compelled to look at her, because she just doesn’t look normal, but on a big poster like this - well, I have to look away. The city fire service often puts signs up on this corner, but this is the first one that bugs me. My initial reaction to it was that it was inappropriate, but that’s sort of like saying it’s inappropriate for this woman to go out it public, and I certainly don’t feel that way. I just don’t know how to react to it.
By the third or fourth time I saw that commercial, I was almost in tears, wanting to go get that baby and comfort it! It’s amazing how we respond to a baby’s cry! I wonder how hard it was on the set, for the parent allowing their baby to cry like that, even for only a minute, and not rushing out into the scene to do something about it!
As a cook, I can say that’s what she gets for not working in a kitchen with rubber mats. Without those mats, you are guaranteed to bust your ass just from the various things that get spilled over the course of a night–rubber gloves, broccoli, mashed potatoes.
And most kitchens don’t have such mats, because most restaurants have’t put any thought into it, and if someone does fall they just think it’s an “Accident.” My sister fell in a kitchen she was working in once, and was the fourth or fifth fall they had that year.
A lot of workplaces are still disgracefully ignorant of basic safety theory and practice. Believe me, I see them all the time, and some of the dumb shit I’ve seen just blows me away. Actually, most PEOPLE are ignorant of it, but that’s understandable - not everyone can be a safety expert - but any workplace should put some effort into having someone who understands it do proper inspections and take corrective action as required.
I have no intention of actually going and watching that video, if I want to see gross things happen to people, I have a couple of episodes of CSI on my DVR I haven’t watched yet.
Seriously? My experience is pretty limited to the Alabama area, but I’ve been working in kitchens for a few years now and I’ve never seen a kitchen without them. You’d have an easier time keeping employees without baking sheets and pots and pans than without rubber mats.
Even if not for safety but for increased productivity. I know that I move about 60% slower when we’ve pulled the mats for cleaning at the end of the night.
We have them all over the kitchen and I still slipped in the very very narrow slip of exposed floor between the kitchen and dish pit. Damn near broke my neck.
Whenever I pulled KP duty in Basic, they were very specific about the need for rubber mats on the floors, at least in the dishwashing and pots-and-pans areas. If the manager came in and saw us washing dishes without the mats down, she’d probably scream at us and not give us any ice cream (even worse, she’d probably tell our instructor, who would have us pushing in our dorm later and reflecting on how pushups would be easier if we had rubber mats in our dormitories…)
For what it’s worth, the dining facilities we had in Basic were investigated periodically by three different organizations each day: The company that all the staff worked for, the Air Force, and some separate government agency (whoever would be in charge of food safety), all who had their various (often overlapping) requirements for how things had to be. If any one of those inspectors wasn’t happy, and if it was something that one of us on KP duty was responsible for (pretty much anything outside of the “Danger Zone” - the cooking/food prep area itself - then it was mucho mal for us. I don’t know how often regular kitchens are checked.
We don’t have the rubber mats at the kitchen I work in. But then, we would never be carrying a large pot of boiling water, or a large pot of ANYTHING, for that matter. The worst thing that you could be carrying if you fell would be a pan of soup, which wouldn’t be boiling, but still hot, and would cause burns, but I doubt death.
Ah, man, that was the best monthly safety meeting ever when we got to watch that one! Normally we’re stuck with these rather dire PSA videos that are vintage 70s. Seriously. The horrid Tornado Warning! one actually shows them using the Power of Computers to track tornadoes. Computers with magnetic tape reels. Oy.
That fork lift one was so amusing that we watched it twice, and actually had a good little discussion about forklift safety. (mainly, that we’d like to stay away from the warehouses, since we work in the lab and don’t use forklifts)
Had that PSA been around in the early 90s, one of my co-workers would have had a different, German nickname. Instead of “drum-drop Gary.”
