Health and Safety...

Hopefully this will become a running theme in this blog - anyone who's been here knows it crops up in conversation a lot. This of course implies that I'll keep this blogging thing going but from the little feedback I've received I've concluded that at the moment I'm doing this as much for myself as anyone else.

The photos I took this morning of the guys repairing our air conditioning are fairly typical with regard to worker's attitudes to health and safety. That is they only appear to care for their personal safety when they've been instructed to.

To whit - the two guys working on the unit clearly didn't have a ladder long enough to reach the unit so they improvised (something people are far better at doing then I ever would be) but by tying two ladders together. Now I don't know how differently a bamboo ladder and an aluminium ladder would bend under pressure but that's really putting a lot of faith in one's ability to tie a knot.

One saving grace is that one of them is wearing a safety harness, presumably because he's been told to do so. Admittedly it's a belt so, if he did fall backwards off the ladder and it did break his fall, it would probably also break his spine. Still - no need to worry about that - if you look at the first picture it's fairly obvious that the end of the harness is dangling behind his left leg.

My Chinese teacher mentioned today that there are always two or three window cleaners killed in the city every year. I wonder why...?