The Weirdest Workplace Incidents

A manufacturing plant in the Midwest had to shut down an entire production area because someone reported a suspicious chemical cloud drifting across the

floor. People backed away, alarms were raised, and supervisors ran over in full emergency mode. Turns out it actually wasn’t a chemical cloud at all. It was

flour. A single 50 lb bag ripped, slowly leaking from the forklift line, drifting like a haunted fog across everything. No

PPE breach, no toxic exposure. It was just flour. But here’s the thing. The response revealed way more than the incident itself. It showed gaps in

communication, training blind spots, and how fast assumptions spread when systems aren’t tight. And that’s exactly what our episode is about today. The

workplace incidences that you’ve never heard of, the weird ones, the why is it my job moments, and the surprisingly important lessons that teach us about

safety culture, process discipline, and human behavior. And to help me break these down, I’ve got not just one but two seasoned EHS practitioners with me.

People who have led programs, seen the strange and then the unbelievable, and live to tell the stories.

Welcome back to the Safety Brief. I am Monica, joined by always my co-host Scott. And today we’re also joined by

Scott. Two Scots on one podcast. That’s definitely not confusing. But in all seriousness, this is a treat because

both Scots have decades of hands-on experience in EHS operations, and everything in between. They’ve seen the good, the bad, the bizarre, the kinds of

workplace moments that you truly can’t mess up. So, Scott Gerard, do you want to take a moment to introduce yourself?

Sure. And I’m just delighted to be here, but I’m Scott Gerard. I’m uh an intellect uh consultant uh inside of our

center of excellence now, but I’ve spent the last 35 years as an EHS practitioner. Worked in a variety of fields u industrial manufacturing,

construction, energy, uh Mr. Gatis might say I couldn’t hold a job. That’s why I’ve got so much exposure in so many different areas. But uh just a a wide

range of u uh industries I’ve worked in and and uh really looking forward to today’s topic. Amazing. Happy to have

you here. And Scott G, my co-host, do you want to give the listeners just a quick reminder of your credentials?

Yeah. So, uh, vice president safety and health here at Intellects. But before that, Scott and I go back a long, long way. We, uh, we have literally worked

very close together for a lot of years, but uh, I was the global leader for Kimberly Clark and Bristol Squib for safety and health and environmental

work. But I started actually life as a uh site level practitioner at GE. So uh

so we both have about the same same years of experience and a lot of weird things have happened on our watch. So we are we are primed for this discussion.

Can’t wait to dive in. That’s going to be exciting. Um all right. So let’s jump into today’s topic. I’ve pulled four examples of the weirdest workplace

incidences you’ve probably never heard of. These are the kinds of stories that make you shake your head, laugh, or question how it even happened. But they

actually do teach us a ton about safety culture and how incidences really happen. And of course, before we dive in, Scott squared. As practitioners, you

already know this, but for our listeners, every story we’re sharing today is based on real instances taken from industry cases and firsthand

experience. So naturally, names, companies, locations are going to be anonymous for a reason. Um, so without further ado, let’s jump into the first

story, which is called the exploding safety glasses.

So imagine this. You’re on a production floor minding your business and suddenly pop. One of your co-workers safety glasses shoots off their face like a

slingshot. Then another one pops and another. People think there’s a pressure issue. Someone even wonders if there’s a chemical reaction with the plastic. The

EHS team is trying to stay calm, but meanwhile, these safety glasses are flying off faces like some kind of bizarre workplace whack-a-mole. Turns out though, it’s not a chemical hazard.

It’s not a system failure either. It’s just a bad batch of safety glasses where the frames shrank when exposed to heat, creating enough pressure to launch

themselves outward. So, what I got from the lesson here was that it wasn’t even about the eyewear. It was about supplier

quality and trust. even PPE needs incoming inspection and that a tiny oversight upstream causes chaos downstream. But what do you guys think from your practitioner perspectives?

Oh boy, I’m I’m going to bet we both have a comment about this, but the first thing that I would say, I’ve never had

this specific problem in in one of my facilities. However, I have had plenty of problems with the procurement

function at the uh at the sites that I managed when I was in a corporate row uh leading leading some of that that work

with procurement because procurement is always trying to be very efficient and protect the uh the resources of the

company which usually means how can I find the cheapest PPE that’s on the market that I can buy and many times

right that’s exactly what happens. Now, I think Scott’s going to agree with me is that when we look at PPE, we’re looking at quality. We are looking at

protection level. We’re looking at comfort. We are actually looking to see if that person will actually wear what we’re asking them to put on. Right? So,

there’s a lot of factors that go into uh into that decision. But, as you can imagine, sometimes our cost, right, are

exorbitantly high compared to what procurement can can actually buy that for. So, if I had to guess, right, what

happened in this case, I’m going to guess that procurement went for the cheapest option that was available and they bought it. Scott, what do you think?

No, I I think you’re spot on. And, you know, I actually uh actually pranked one of my managers one time with exactly

this. The the procurement team was was going for the the the you know, low cost, high volume purchase. the the the

gear didn’t fit anybody. It didn’t really protect anybody. And we were building a new new manufacturing plant and my manager didn’t have a lot of

construction experience. And I was I was really the construction uh safety person. So he came out to the plant site

one day dressed in a suit, right? We’re deep in we’re deep in cut and fill. So we’re moving we’re moving dirt and mud

all around the site. So he comes out in a suit and he and he never brought his PPE that we provided to him. But but he

was always looking for ways to cut corners on cost. So we got some of the it’s almost novelty PPE Scott. So we got

him an oversized hard hat. It was about 50% bigger than it should have been. Put him in goggles. Put him in a vest that

was lime green. I mean it was the brightest green vest I’ve ever seen. It was about two and a half times too big for him. had him blouse his pants into

his boots and told him to go sit out on the gator on the four-wheel drive open air vehicle that we were going to tour the plant

site with. And by the time he got out there, we had drawn a crowd. So, people were just like just just really having a good time with the way we had dressed up

the manager. And we really kind of made a point with, hey, you know, PPE’s not only got to be of the right caliber,

right, of of of the right quality of protecting for the right hazards, but it’s got to fit and it’s got to look good. If it if you don’t look good in

PPE, people are going to reject it and they’re not going to wear it. So, you know, that’s kind of a funny story that’s always stuck with me and I I

don’t I think to this day, 20ome years later, he’s never forgiven me for what I did to it. But Monica, I I would say this, right?

There’s a serious side about this story, you know, because Scott and I, we do see this quite often and and I know every

listener is going to to actually look back at this and say, “Yep, that that’s happened to us.” But, you know, I I can

remember back when I started, PPE didn’t come in a lot of sizes, right? So you had this size and and if it was a uh a

Tyveck coverall or a Durfab coverall, usually it was it was it was manufactured thinking about a man,

right, in in the work environment. And so you would have gloves, you would have glasses, you would have hard hats, all

basically built for for a male. Um, and I I can remember this like yesterday is

that I had a a smaller statured female employee that was wearing a pair of gloves that that I had had assigned to

her and she came back and she was very bold. She slapped me across the face with those gloves and she she shook them in my face and said, “Who bought these

gloves?” Right? And of course I did. You know, I I bought the gloves and didn’t think anything about it, right? Less skews, right? All of those kind of

things that we buy for. but they didn’t fit her. And actually, her wearing those gloves was really more unsafe than it was if she didn’t have gloves on at all.

So, that was a real big lesson for me is things got to fit. They have to be made thinking about the genders that are in your workforce. Uh they have to look

good, right? So, fashion is is a part of of, believe it or not, of PPE. And so, all of those things kind of kind of go

into that. So when I say that procurement would drive me crazy in some of these discussions, it is important to

be able to prove even ROI, you know, back to to procurement and say, well, this is why, right, that we need to make that decision.

You know, Scott, that that reminds me of of a quick glove story. And and and that is, you know, again, when I started gloves were gloves, right?

Glove story. Yeah.

Glove story. Not the love story. The glove story. Love story of gloves.

Yeah. And and you got to love your gloves, right? But gloves were gloves.

And you used to buy just the jersey glove and they were 98 cents and you bought them by the gross.

And we were having hand injuries with a particular crew doing a particular job on our building construction sites. And

we went to the glove manufacturers and found a glove that was purpose-built for that kind of activity. It was an impact

resistant glove. So it had the exoskeleton on the outside. Kind of looked a little cool. Well, it almost looked like the racing gloves that Dale Earnhard Jr. used to wear with the

Skeletor, you know, on the outside of them.

And and the guys loved them and they took care of them because they were kind of a symbol of pride. But but the spend that we had for that particular glove

and they were expensive. They were $18 a pair as I remember. But we were we started saving tens of thousands of

dollars in injuries, right? So, we’re affecting work comp costs and and claim costs, but we’re also sending people

home whole at the end of the day without the hand injuries. So, looking good and feeling good, you know, as as uh

Fernando used to say, you doesn’t matter how you you look or feel as long as you look good, you look marvelous, you know.

So, you got to look marvelous in your PPE.

I think that’s the important thing is you can’t cut corners where it matters because that’s where you’ll feel it the most. At least that’s what I got from that.

Yeah. Yeah. You got to take an active role.

You gota you got to take an active role between procurement, right? And especially the safety practitioner. So we we’ve got a part of that to own,

right? We just can’t leave it all over to a to a group that’s trying to be as efficient as they can, which I get that, you know, but yeah. Yeah.

Interesting. All right. Well, jumping into the second story. This one kind of sounds like a movie scene, and I can’t believe it’s real, but

about the spider that shut down an entire night shift. So, a facility kept getting overnight security alarms.

Motion sensors tripping between 1 and 3:00 a.m. And it happened so often that leadership started thinking someone was sneaking in after hours. EHS was called,

maintenance was called, it was called, but nobody could find the source.

Finally, someone decided to put a camera on the motion detector to catch whatever is triggering it. And at 2:47 a.m., the

culprit appeared. It was a single spider building its web across the sensor lens, waving its little legs, and triggering

alarms like it owned the place. And I think this one teaches us a surprising truth that not every root cause is

mechanical. Sometimes the environment is the hazard. And this is why inspections need to look beyond equipment and humans. and also the importance of

keeping up with your inspections. What do you guys think?

Yeah, you know, it’s it’s almost as if we had prompted you with these topics and and the audience, we had not. But

this reminds me of another story. I mean, I guess I guess when you’ve been around as long as Scott and I have, you got a story for every story, but

building a building a manufacturing plant and we we got a bunch of fittings that had come in from Asia, as I remember, and a couple of cases of pipe

fittings came in and they were full of brown recluse spiders. So, as soon as they hit the building, they took off for

the rafters and and we had we we saw them, you know, the iron workers don’t want to work. The electricians don’t want to work. The pipe fitters don’t

want to work in those areas because of the the hazard of brown recluse spiders.

So, I had to call an exterminator. And I said, uh, hey, I I I need an exterminator out here. We’ve got brown recluse fighters. And, but I back to

procurement. I do kind of need a price to know what I’m dealing with here. You know, I want to get three prices and and be, you know, a good steward of the

company’s money. And they said, “Well, how big’s the building?” I said, “Well, it’s 1.4 million square feet.” And they were like, “No, no, no. It can’t be that big. that’s that’s the size of your

entire plant site. How big’s the building? I said, “Well, it’s it’s 1.4 million square feet.” And and they wouldn’t believe me. So, we said, “Well,

a bay is 400 by 400.” So, I had them price it by the bay, you know, inside this big huge manufacturing plant. And

that’s how we finally got pricing together to get these spiders out. But yeah, the you know environmental factors and and and critters, you know, I’ve

worked a lot in uh in solar uh construction for industrial scale solar facilities. So spiders, snakes, you

know, um endangered species like the burrowing owl here in Florida. Um you know, all all those all those things are

that things that I never was taught in school. When I when I went to school to study environmental health and safety,

nobody told me I would be counting spiders or horned owls or whatever it might be and how to deal with those. So,

Scott, I know you’ve got a story and I just know you do.

Well, I I do. I mean, I I think again, you know, because we’ve been around so long, we’ve all had spiders and we’ve all had critters that have jumped out of

boxes that were not common to the places where we worked. Anytime that you have raw materials coming into a facility,

especially a global facility, there there’s just uh you know, snakes and spiders and and rats and all kind of

critters, possums and raccoons. So, you you do see them all, you know, and I think that we could talk about the weirdness of that all day long, and I think Scott did that really really well.

Uh but the real diagnostic as I was listening to us talk about this isn’t whether this kind of weird thing is going to happen. You know, probably most

of us have had this weird thing happen and it happens in complex operations quite often. I think my lesson out of

this, Monica, is how does an organization respond to something like this? Do we do leaders treat kind of

these these anomalies with curiosity? Or do we just dismiss them and call the the pest control, right, person? Uh- because

I’ I think I’ve done both of those things, right? let’s call pests control and get this this situation stopped. You know, does it does the investigation,

you know, stop at human error or do we do we dig into the conditions right to make sure vendors are sending this in, you know, clean raw materials when when

it’s possible to do that? Uh do we get the front line involved, you know, asking them these questions? because uh

you know to to uh to Scott’s point recluse or a black recluse that’s a fairly uh you know dangerous hazard to

to deal with and it would absolutely be a recordable or a reportable incident had a bite happen. So you know so is it

a management exercise? Do we treat it just purely from an EHS you know uh perspective? But the lesson I got, you know, from that as I I listened to you

both talk is weird when we explain weird things away, we minimize them or we just

bury them in direct in generic corrective action. And I think that yeah, I spider events have happened

probably to all of us. How did we really treat that? You know, there’s some learning there to take away. You know, Scott, something something that you said

triggered triggered this thought with me too is and that is our ability to respond as practitioners. And I think some of it comes a little bit with age,

but I think it also comes with the flexibility that we build into our emergency response plans or our instant response plans that we don’t get them so regimented

that it’s only for this type of an event or that type of an event. But but it but it allows you to flex and respond to that unusual.

And you know it in my career I think the unusual you know when work doesn’t go as planned or something happens or weather

impacts us those those unusual pressures that are put upon us is is when we really have to be at our best

because that’s when that’s when the serious incidents can occur.

Yeah. No, I agree. And I’m actually very curious how that debrief went the next morning and if they did have to file the report like what did they say? it was a

spider and how that was handled. But no, I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think it’s absolutely important to be prepared for the unexpected

because it always happens. Um, and yeah, just echoing what I said before, it just highlights the importance of inspections

and staying on top of it and just being prepared for what you don’t even think is going to happen. Um, all right.

I’ve got a I’ve got a weird and wacky one. Uh, I I think that this really needs to get weird and and wacky. So, I

I have one of those. I I actually have two, but I’ll just start with this one.

If we have time, I’ll share the next one. But, uh, and I I won’t name where I was, but but it was a large operation,

had about 600 700 employees at it. About 30 acres surrounded this site, and most

of the land uh was fenced around the perimeter of the manufacturing facility.

But the rest of it was open. So we just basically placed it, put signs up saying please don’t trespass, all those kind of things. But we did have roads that

intersected our own property. So this actually happened is and and back in the day and Scott has done this too is that

uh you had safety and and you had environmental work and you also had security as a part of your role and and security happened to fall into my

responsibility. So, one day I get a call from from a security guard, you know, at our main security office and said, “We

just had an incident. I need you to come come out.” And I said, “What’s what’s the incident?” I think it was on a Saturday. So, I was home and uh they

said, “Well, said there was a couple that decided to picnic down by the river, but along the the the fence line

of our property, and they were drinking alcohol, right? So they both were were intoxicated and they decided that it

would be a great idea to to to target shoot. So they they got out a gun and

somehow this this uh this this man uh talked his girlfriend into putting a can on top of her head and he was going to

shoot the can off the top of her head and he missed. he missed and literally shot her in the top of the head and

killed her on on our property on our plant property. And how I learned about this is the uh the young the young man

felt so bad that he he was looking for help. So he comes over to our security office, basically turns himself in,

gives us the gun, and said, you know, that he did all of this by mistake because he was intoxicated.

um you know, so how do you take all of that in? How do you take all of that in over the phone? So I immediately went

out and and the person was still in uh in the security office when I got there.

I could tell he was very remorseful. I could tell he was very intoxicated. Uh but believe it or not, he was charged with manslaughter and actually went to

prison uh because of of that event. Uh so you know so talking about weird and wacky uh that may be the weirdest and

wackiest thing that I’ve ever had to manage but it it did it did bring about a lot of uh a lot of change you know

about how we maintained security of the property who we allowed on who we uh allowed off site. Uh we increased

security patrols right to make sure that no one was on on our property at those times and we enlarged the fence line.

So, a lot of those things, right, you you would think, well, I don’t have to do that. No one’s actually going to go down to the river and and get intoxicated. But when you think about

that from a pure fun standpoint, well, those things kind of sound attractive, right? To be able to sit by the river and have a picnic. You just don’t expect

the rest of it to kind of evoke. So, that is my weirdest and maybe wackiest.

And I’ve got one more, but I I’ll stop there. Maybe Scott has one to share.

Oh, I I don’t I don’t think I can top that. And I would love to hear the next one. You know, I Scott, when when things

like that happen though, I I you know, oftentimes management will then start start to respond to us, right? When when

and we get more funding or we get more more more whatever it more fencing in in your case, you know, I I think to what

happened with COVID and you know, how how none of us had ever dealt with a pandemic unless well maybe you had with the flu of 18 1918, but

um yeah. Uh I was prepared not to be.

So you were you were the one EHS professional that was truly prepared to gone through the the flu epidemic. But you know it just changes the way

operations and management sometimes looks at what we do. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

So let’s hear the next one. I I kind of digging to see if I can honestly this this this one happened at

the same location. Um, we were we were building the facility. So, it was a Greenfield site, right? A lot of a lot

of land around me, a lot of contractors on site. I call this one dog the bounty hunter. Is that another another event,

right, that uh where the security guards uh called and and I was on the plant site at at that day and they said, “We

we have a uh we have a man that’s at the the the fence. He’s come through the gate.” And he did. that he charged through the gate with his vehicle. He

broke our gate down and he’s standing at the entrance of the construction gate demanding to see an employee a

subcontractor that was and he was waving a gun. Uh so you can imagine, right? I call the police. I I get things going

from that perspective and then I go out to the u you know to the job site to figure out what this was all about. He’s

still there. He’s put away his gun, but he wants everyone to know that he has it. And he’s looking for one employee

and uh a subcontractor. And we find that person and somehow this man talks that

subcontractor into his vehicle and they take off before the police ever arrive.

Uh so now I’ve got the police working on this. I think this man’s been kidnapped.

I don’t know what’s going on. Come to find out it was a bounty hunter with a warrant to to actually arrest that

person. And uh he was totally and I didn’t know this. He was totally within his legal right to do what he did with

the exception of crossing into the gate of our of our work site. Um so there was a little bit of trouble that that

happened because of that. But I learned a tremendous amount that day about dog the bounty hunter and and what he or she

can or can’t do if they’ve got a warrant in their their hand to bring uh to bring a person to justice. But that happened

that absolutely happened. So that may be right up there with the two weirdest things that have ever occurred to to me on my watch.

I don’t even know what to say to that.

That’s that’s crazy. like what how does how does your company recover from that?

Like what is the lesson? Like what do you tell your team?

Yeah. Well, there’s there’s a I learned a lot. I didn’t know such things actually. You know, I think I watched Dog the Bounty Hunter once or twice on TV, so I kind of thought how it worked.

I just don’t I don’t think I ever thought it could happen locally and it did. And u I I I learned a couple of

things. If the bounty is high enough, right, if there is a bounty reward high enough, there are people that are

designated to find you and they will find you. Uh I I have found that the workplace is not the safe place for you

to be, you know, and uh I have found that a warrant works regardless to where you are. So those are those are a couple

things that I took away. I think what what we did do is to improve our security measures to to reflect that,

right? is that we didn’t even have a section in policy about this even being able to be uh you know a chance to

happen. I even had to call the corporate security team to find out if we even had a policy such as this. We did not.

Right. So we actually had to make new corporate policy to reflect some of these changes, how to deal with those those type of things. I think a couple

of things that I learned sociably is how people reacted, you know. So, we lost a little bit of control with a security

team that was unarmed, trying to deal with somebody that was armed, right? So, we had to deescalate that pretty

quickly, which which we did. Uh, but I I guess there was a lot of learning to uh

to always be prepared for the things that you would not think could happen, right? So, it it does require us. I

think what it does is we’ve got to do a better job of benchmarking what great looks like when it comes to security or

what the most forwardthinking idea is in and how we protect the work site. You can always back down, right? But uh but

I think you you’ve got to know I think one of the things that I enjoy about using chat GPT to outline things that I

want to understand better. There’s always these two or three things that I did not think about. Right? And I think that that’s kind of what feels in here

is that what are those two or three things that you are not thinking about in protecting your work site for safety or environmental or or even you know

security in this case. You know, I was I was going to ask you about that because it seems like maybe, you know, we go in with a confirmation bias that, hey, this

guy’s a bad guy because he’s coming in, he’s looking for one individual. I mean, my first thoughts is, oh my god, he’s going to he’s going to kill the guy, right? We do.

He’s he’s messed with his wife or whatever whatever the case might be. And I’ve got those stories, too. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, those I think that’s a different podcast. Yeah, but um you know uh I just wonder if that would

happen to you again if you would be much much nicer to the guy to share in the bounty, you know, as a as a possibility. Yeah, right.

I can find him for you. You know, and I didn’t see the gun before he left, but everyone that saw the gun said it was a really big gun. So, they uh that’s what matters.

They they It was right. It certainly set the precedent of how we were going to deal, but that that one ranks right up there of weird and wacky things that have happened.

Probably long barrel pistol that look like they the guys that do the Miami Towing or whatever the show is on TV where they

I think it was more like Clint Eastwood Clint Eastwood kind of look. Yeah.

I need to know what did the guy do to justify such a reaction.

Yeah. Well, he had skipped bail. So, he was put in put in bail uh for a serious offense. I don’t really know what the serious offense was, but the bounty was

pretty high. So, he was bailed out. The way this works, right, is that you’re bailed out by a bail bondsman, and if you don’t pay that money back, then of

course you uh you’re just free game to to to poach. And that’s what happened here is that the the bounty was high

enough that somebody u decided that it was worth going after. And and that’s that’s really how these bounties work is

that you’ve got bounty hunters almost like we do, you know, now with with trailering, you know, things across the

country. Well, that bounty’s high enough. I’m going to go find this person. And it’s kind of the way it happens. It’s all electronic now, you know, so you don’t really even have to

go to a bell bon to figure it out. It’s all on the web. So, yeah. Yeah.

Wow. It’s quite the story. Um, well, I Things you learn on this podcast are amazing, right? Yeah, it’s what we do it for. You know, some

lessons. Now, if people ever come across the situation at their workplace, they’re going to know what to do.

They’ll know who to call. They’ll call Scott. Call Scott. They’ll call Scott. He’s got that policy.

You know, Scott, I was I was thinking of some some weird things. And and and this one’s this one’s not a happy story, but you know, I was I was working for a

company and and we were in the u uh emergency services type industry. I don’t want to get too specific here for

for fear of offending somebody, but we were just trending the wrong way. You just started seeing a pattern of of

deviation from normal from, you know, standardized work. And I went to the to the operations lead and said, “Hey, I’d really like to st have a little

standown, just just a short one. I know we’re I know we’re here to respond to the public when they have emergencies.

I’d like to just have 15 minutes and just get everybody to settle for a minute. And I got the lecture that well,

you don’t understand operations. You don’t understand what we do. You don’t understand how we’re missionritical. And I’m sure I’m sure other practitioners

that are listening to the podcast today have all been in that position. And I let it go. And 24 less than 24 hours

later, I got a call from the operation center from the from the dispatch that said, “Hey, we’ve just had an accident.

We’ve lost we’ve lost touch with one of our units, and two of the three crew members died in the accident.” Oh my. Wow.

Yeah. And you know, I we’re we’re telling funny stories today.

And again, I don’t want to be a downer, but you know, those those stories and and and that little guy that gets up on your shoulder is so critical, and I

think it’s one of the reasons AI will never replace us, Scott. And I know I know you’ve done a whole bunch of of research and and and publications on AI.

But I think that’s that’s listening to that little guy on your shoulder.

Yeah. drawing from experiences from others, I think, is so critical because these aren’t always black swan events

that we’re talking about here. The these these happen these happen all the time and and trust your instincts.

Yeah, I think and and I I’m sure Monica’s going to be shutting us down here before before long, right? But I I think Scott, you you said something I I

think that that just kind of spurs me, right, to to say these is that, you know, weird things themselves are often

a signal of drift, right? We we’ve seen some drift in the process and and uh you know, they reveal a gap of how we

imagine work, right? So if I could imagine work, I would have said, well, shooting someone on our property is not going to happen or coming across a

security gate is not going to happen. So what procedures say should happen and then work as done, what actually happens

could be two different things, right? So I I think that for me it’s always kind of be prepared. They they they really

expose what I’ve always called latent conditions, right? These unexpected interactions between system elements and

and these workarounds that we always try to to employ in the work that we do. And I I I often talk about this

normalization of devian as well. I’m just going to accept, you know, that devian as normal, you know, in in the

work environment. And uh and those are all weak signals, right? So I I and and Sydney Decker I think he he said that

best in a lot of his publications is that being resilient, you know, in the work environment means looking at all of

these weak signals, whether it’s a spider, whether it’s an exploding pair of safety eyewear or a guy picnicking on

on the side of a river, right? They’re just precursors that in hindsight tell us something more, right, about things

that could happen, right? And I I don’t want to go overboard and say, well, you really got to plan for everything, you know, but you do have to do a healthy

set of diagnostics of what could happen, right? If we allow too loose of control

uh to happen really. And and Scott and I, we’ve always led complex operations.

So the more complex operations are, you can bet that the more of these weird wacky things could happen, right? So, so

I think that would be my lesson is that, you know, look for drift. Where where am I seeing drift? Where am I thinking that

we’ve got full control versus what’s really happening? Right.

I’m guessing, Scott, that that the episode with William Tell at the river was not the first time somebody had picnicked.

Nope. on the on the property and and they just kind of well they’re not hurting anything. It’s a beautiful area,

but they’re way out of the way. The the the yellow gear that’s prepping the sites never going to impact them.

They’re not impacting us. Let’s just let it let it be. And that’s right.

Yeah, it it’s exactly right is that we just decided not to monitor that area because it was beautiful. It was a nice area and we we actually mowed that area.

So we we we took care of that area because at times employees would would go down to that area and have lunch, but but we we definitely didn’t gate it. We

definitely didn’t control it to outside interest. And you know, in hindsight, I knew people were going down there to picnic or to fish or whatever they wanted to do. But uh so lesson learned.

Lesson learned from that wild and wacky thing that happened.

Take some target practice before you go picnicking. That’s my lesson. Exactly. Yeah. Leave the butt at home.

Leave the butt at home. So, yeah, it’s a great lesson and I think that’s a good way to wrap up today’s uh

podcast, which is the weirdest workplace incidences that you’ve probably never heard of. Um, I did have one story, but

I’ll just summarize it in a sentence. It was a employee who thought he had severe chemical burns, but it actually ended up

being a leaking crate of ultra concentrated hot sauce.

So, wow.

What all of these stories have in common is that incidences don’t always have to be these dramatic disasters. I mean, sometimes you shoot your girlfriend in

the head and that’s a whole different story, but sometimes you have a spider that tempers with your security, whatever it may be. The smallest,

strangest, most unexpected events reveal gaps in training, communication systems, and I think that’s where we learn, adapt, and we make our workplaces safer.

So, if there’s one thing to remember, I think it’s just stay curious, stay observant, never underestimate the lessons in the what the heck just

happened moment. Um, and just continue to improve like both of you had shared with your stories. It’s despite the the

weirdness, there was something good that came out of it. Whether it was more security or better protocol or better PPE, um, I

think there’s always something to be learned. Scott, Scott, anything you wanna finish off with?

I think you summarized it very well. I appreciate the time today. And Scott, as always, I always enjoy interacting with you. And Monica, again, thanks for hosting us today.

Amazing. Thank you.

All right. Well, thank you both and thank you for listening to the safety brief. Please subscribe so you never miss an episode and we will catch you guys on the next one. Thanks.