Monday, August 23, 2004

Annoying Precautions

A family member this last week decided to do a "manly job" of cleaning up the chicken shit from the manure spreader on the farm. He took a hammer and proceeded to whack the rusty blade; trying to dislodge some manure and some rust so that the blade would turn more freely. In so doing, he dislodged a piece of metal which flew into his eye. Well, it wasn't enough that he'd made a stupid decision to save 5 minutes and not put on safety goggles. He decided that it was just a small piece of something in his eye and that it would just get flushed out at some point. He awoke Sunday with impaired vision and was told that his eye had specks of color throughout it. He finally (on Sunday afternoon) went to the doctor to be told that he had an infection in his eye and that it was threatening the eyeball. He was ambulanced (I'm sure that cost something too) from Bradley to Erlanger. He had emergency surgery to remove the original piece of metal from his eye and try to clean out the infection (cha-ching!). He now has to stay in the hospital for at least 24 more hours (cha-ching! again). There is no guarantee that he'll keep his eyeball and he will probably have impaired vision. All this for the time-saving process of living free and dying young!! Woohoo!! Aren't we rebels flaunting those safety rules!! How much money did it cost? How many people had to adjust their schedules on Sunday or Monday? Ya know, I'm not really pissed at the guy; I feel for the problem he is suffering and what may happen to him. What I am pissed off about is the "devil may care" attitude about just taking the precautions that can be proven to save time, money and emotions. Wear your damned seatbelts when you get in the car. I know people who have said, "I don't like how restricted it makes me feel." or even "It wrinkles my clothes." Who gives a rat's rear? Put the damned thing on. Wear safety glasses when you are working with something where you could reasonably expect pieces of debris to be flying through the air. If your goal is to knock some rusty metal loose from some other metal, then put the damned goggles on! Save yourself some time overall and save all of us the hassle of having to take care of a preventable situation. If you want to go get drunk, have at it. Drink 'til you piss yourself. Just don't get behind the wheel, numnuts. Insipid behavior like this just annoys the crap outta me. Well, I guess I should go back to feeling sorry for this guy and say how sad and tragic a mistake it was . . . next time, put the damned goggles on!


On a separate note I shot a set with a model this last weekend. I'm writing a tutorial on modeling photography and this shoot was so that I could demonstrate some lighting skills. You can see photos at http://www.pbase.com/kevinriggs/portraits/

Thanks for reading,

Kev

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