If you're new around these parts, I just want to say how much I appreciate your dropping by! Oh, and you may want to subscribe to my feed. Thanks, and a tip o' the hat to ya!

Exactly how much impact do your actions have on the rest of the world, anyway? Do you know? Is there any way to really measure it? And what about the ripple effect of consequences that travel down the time stream? Where will they stop (sound of Twilight Zone theme) – or do they?

OK, OK, enough with the twenty questions, already! (Alright; it was only six, but I think you get my meanin’!)

When I was working in Portland, Oregon, my office was located in a group of temporary buildings at the job site. Now normally these things are little more than air-conditioned boxes, connected together (#1,693 of the 10,000 ways to use duct tape) and set on pilings. (I wrote about one of my adventures in this very place in the post, What a Ride!)

Anyway, ours was just one of many such offices, clumped together in a sortof grid layout. It was almost like a little miniature town; we had the inevitable security trailer, infirmary, cafeteria, 30 to 40 different vendors’ trailers – I’m tellin’ ya; we had it all.

The entire area was built on what used to be an open field which originally was mostly just dirt. Once the trailer-hive was established, though, the entire area was covered with crushed rock (it helps minimize the mud during rains – and in Portland it rains all the time). It wasn’t exactly flat, either; there were a few slopes and little hills to negotiate when walking from place to place.

Actually, that’s where I ran into trouble one day. I mean, there I was, just mindin’ my own cotton-pickin’ business walking between trailers when I took a slight misstep (actually, my stupid foot slipped off the stupid edge of the stupid concrete sidewalk) and tumbled down the side of a short slope (sound of prolonged crashing and burning). Pencils, clipboard and soft drink – man, it all went flying; ending up in a painful pile at the bottom.

What makes something like this so humiliating was that it pretty much was my own fault. Yep, you’ve been there, right? After all, I’d only been walking since I was, oh, about two. Grbl, grbl. Just not paying enough attention to where I was putting my feet – which is pretty much a cardinal rule on any construction site.

Sure enough, I’d sprained my right ankle. Several nearby workers saw the accident and came rushing over to help. After determining there were no immediate life-threatening injuries (other than my pride, that is), they ended up carrying me like a sack of potatoes to the infirmary. Copious numbers of cold packs were wrapped around my already swelling ankle.

The rest of the day I spent popping extra-strength Tylenol, my foot propped up on my desk. No doubt the aforementioned workers spent the rest of the day regaling their fellows with the soon-to-be-classic Tale of the Clumsy Engineer. I felt really, really bad – both physically and mentally.

To add insult to injury, then the even more painful process of accident reporting began. Augh, the paperwork! You wouldn’t believe how many forms there are to fill out for something like this. In fact, because they go into such depth it’s not called a report; it’s an investigation.

Don’t get me wrong; it has to be done. The idea is to prevent such things from happening, so if the investigation finds something useful, it’s implemented right away to keep anyone else from getting hurt.

(I want to say this because I really believe it: Safety really is the number one priority at most job sites; it must be. I’ll tell you why in a minute.)

Ah well. Eventually the ankle healed, the lessons learned, and life went on. No big deal, right?

Well, not quite.

Fast forward with me (sound of chipmunks discussing the weather) to around the present day. I’m sitting in our weekly Project Managers’ meeting, and one of the things we talk about and discuss every meeting are the safety incidents from the previous week. This particular week there were not one, but two incidents where somebody backed their vehicle into a pole. Sheesh! How can people be so stupid?

Then there was this one guy who turned his ankle when he stepped off a concrete walkway… (sound of needle scratching on a record) Huh? Hey, that sounded just like what happened to me years ago in Oregon! Man, for a moment, I could even briefly feel the pain of that swollen ankle.

But for some reason it really hit me right then (sound of dull thud – hey, I may be slow, but sooner or later I’ll “get it”!): What happened to me didn’t just affect me personally, nor even the immediate circle of people surrounding me at the time. No, that incident got reported and discussed all the way up the ladder to the top!

But why would they even care, you ask? Well Bubba, give yourself a prize because you just asked the right question!

Here’s why it’s such an issue – and this is important, folks. It’s because our engineering firm’s ability to win contracts is partly dependent upon a certain minimum level of safety – as determined by the number and type of incidents (there’s a ranking system). When our safety incident level is greater than zero – well, it would be an understatement to say it gets plenty of attention.

See, in a manner of speaking, engineering firms like mine live and die by, among other things, their safety records. In fact, no client will award a contract to a company with a poor safety record – and it’s usually spelled out in most clients’ requests for proposals.

So what to me was just a simple little sprained ankle, well, for my company it had a direct bearing on the gain or loss of literally millions of dollars in business! Now there’s a consequence that’s easy to understand!

Just bear in mind, friends; everything we do has consequences. Some good; some bad – some planned and some, well, not so much. But never forget the ripple effect, either. You might be surprised how far it can reach, and what will come back to haunt you!

(photo Blue Ripples by hotblack)

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!