So as some of you may know, I can't pay my bills just by writing so I keep working on commercial telecom jobs because let's face it: private islands aren't cheap (nor are semi-private islands with a small group of co-islanders, which is what I have of course).
Anyway one of the nice things about having a job I actually care about, plus a bill-payer that I'll walk away from as soon as the writing balance tips a little more in my favour, is that I've become fairly detached from the telecom game. I don't really have any emotional investment in it anymore, which is a little sad in a way because I used to be really on the ball and one of those guys who's really going places career-wise. But now that my much more fun career is moving ahead smoothly and effectively, naturally I've stopped trying to get promoted etc etc etc.
But it turns out that I can't shut off the part of my brain that keeps telling me to accomplish things, no matter how little I have invested in a job or a contract or a company. So I volunteered to join the safety committee of this large telecom, because safety is something I actually care about, independent of the context.
I'm not really sure why I'm making a thread about this. Accountability, maybe? Anyway here's what I'm up to: I work with about a dozen guys on a rotating but regular basis. We all have to drill into walls in old commercial buildings and climb telephone poles and a whole bunch of potentially dangerous stuff.
My big accomplishment is as follows:
I got the company that pays me more than anybody else by a wide margin to adopt a foreign voltage testing program. This took four years and was a ton of work. Basically, I do a lot of aerial work and when I started working for these guys - a 15,000 employee company - their process for determining the safety of a telephone pole before climbing was as follows:
uh...ok
So that was pretty inadequate. The previous outfit I contracted for had a bunch of oilfield sites and they were SUPER tight on safety so I began trying to import a lot of the foreign voltage testing stuff to the new company. They were really resistant (voltage joke) but finally, at the end of 2016, they issued proper detection equipment to the guys that go aloft most. It's not the safety program they need, but it's a start. Out of the dozen guys on my crew, I do probably 95% of the aerial work, so we're pretty well taken care of now. Ridiculous that they still don't have a comprehensive training program for aerial work, but at least I have protected the guys on my crew, and given other teams the opportunity for testing stuff before going up.
This year, and I do expect to work in the field for at least another couple of years, my big goal is to get the guys thinking about masking up before drilling. Every week or so I get together with the crew and talk about asbestos exposure (which I've had, likely to a small degree, but I'm on the provincial registry now for a few different incidents which hopefully lead to nothing) and while we initially got big respirators (also since I insisted on proper air filtration) it turned out nobody was using them.
So I convinced the guy above me to start supplying us with boxes of quality N95 masks, and everybody got a box of masks to keep in their truck. It's a stepping stone, but now I am trying to encourage the guys at every opportunity to keep a mask (which are individually packaged) in their pocket, and mask up before any dust exposure.
I guess the goal for this thread is to keep me thinking about staying on top of this, and trying to generate a culture shift amongst the guys I work with, getting them to start thinking that it's normal to mask up regularly and chuck out the masks afterwards. In general I'm trying to adopt a conscious and deliberate attitude of promoting safe work behaviours, ideally in a manner that keeps people feeling not chastised, but just encouraged to do the right thing. At the weekly meetings this company has, starting at the beginning of the year, I started asking "who masked up this week?" and then high-fiving guys. And by coincidence, it turns out that the guy above me has had to go in for some CT-type scans for a cough that won't go away, so he's suddenly gotten really sympathetic to the idea.
Anyway there you have it. I'm trying to initiate a greater awareness of safety with the guys I deal with on the grunt work, mortgage-payer job because although I don't really expect to do it forever, for most of these guys it's a full-on career. And frankly it's a pretty good career, with a mix of hands-on and brain work and a $75k paycheque, so really nothing to sneeze at. But it has its risks and my goal is to mitigate some of them for these guys before I bail out, and hopefully by talking about it here I'll maintain a bit of extra motivation.