My Photo Is Famous!

[joreth]

I'm so excited!  So, the official U.S. Navy Web Site has a safety section, which discusses an awful lot of things about safety.  But what's really cool about this is they have a Photo Of The Week section where people send in photos of people being incredibly stupid.  And you rarely get much more stupid than my co-workers.

So I take pictures of them at work doing stupid things.  Fortunately, I'm the only one who carries a camera, so no one ever gets pictures of me doing these stupid things.

Anyway, I stumbled upon this site while researching the myth of steel-toe boots and I spent several days laughing my ass off at these stupid people.  I then promptly submitted some photos I had lying around in my Backstage Antics section.

They got accepted!

http://www.safetycenter.navy.mil/photo/archive/archive_251-300/photo264.htm
 

Comments

[redheadlass.livejournal.com]

That's wonderful! Congrats!

Oh, what's the myth of steel toed boots?

[joreth]

The myth is that steel toe boots are more dangerous than regular boots because if something heavy enough falls on your foot, the steel will actually curl and cut your toes off.

The facts are:

1) Anything heavy enough to curl the steel is heavy enough to completely obliterate your toes without the steel so you're gonna lose them anyway

2) The steel doesn't curl. The design of the toe cap has certain strenghts and certain weaknesses and curling at that point is one of the least likely things to happen. Under enough pressure, it squishes, the weak point being at the center of the curve in the toe, not the flat sheet on top.

3) They're designed to withstand a limited amount of pressure, and under independent tests, they do withstand that amount of pressure (and when I say "limited", I mean something like several thousand pounds). They have an ANSI rating stamped on them and they consistently live up to their recorded rating.

4) They're not designed to save your feet from a falling aircraft, nor does that happen very often and if it did, chances are you'd be worried about more than just your toes. They're designed to save your toes from the far more common practice of dropping a wrench on your foot or having a small-ish vehicle run over it (because if it's a largish-vehicle, chances are you wouldn't have been standing close enough to it to just run over your toes).

5) There is only one recorded case in the world of an amputation related to steel-toe boots ... it's in Australia and the doctors amputated because his toes were crushed beyond repair.

6) When Mythbusters busted this myth, the only way they could get an actual amputation was by dropping a sharpened sheet of metal (a blade) down on the boot, it bounced off the steel and hit the boot higher up a second time where there was no steel and *then* cut the boots. But if you drop a blade on your foot, you're gonna lose that foot, steel-toes or no.

Where they *are* more dangerous is when dealing with electricity, but they're *only* worth considering when you have the type of job that you can't wear any metal at all and you have to wear special insulated clothing. If you can have a wrench in your pocket (like we do at work), then you're no less safe with the steel toes on.

And yet, some people I work with still refuse to wear these very practical safety items because they can't seem to wrap their brain around the idea that they will protect your feet within certain reasonable limitations. They are convinced that the steel will curl and amputate their toes and that's somehow worse than having your entire foot mashed to a pulp by whatever it is that is heavy enough to curl the steel.

[redheadlass.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Mike has steel toed boots, and I was worried that the myth was that they help. Not that he needs them in his job or anything, he just has some.

It sounds a lot like the motorcycle helmet myths they cover in the motorcycle safety classes.

[joreth]

Yeah, it's quite similar to those myths. Steel toe boots are just awesome, whether they're required or not. I, for one, have been very thankful for my boots, and not always at work :-)