Irony?

 

That highly amusing picture above has been doing the rounds this morning, attracting many a witty response.

That ditch should have had a fence, sign, and tape, around it.

I don't know how to drive, but my book says you are doing it wrong.

About 10 days of paperwork there. Site should be fenced off pending an investigation with a hazard board placed prominently at the side.

I wonder if in his daily prestart/toolbox he mentioned crashing into a ditch and the best way to eliminate/minimise/isolate the risk of it.

And…. that’s why the Idea of *Zero accidents* is for Retards and Birds.
Imagine the Paperwork on this… Good job!

Yes, I know, I know. Which one of us hasn’t driven a car into a ditch. But it doesn’t mean we can’t laugh our tits off at this wally. And as Tim Wikiriwhi points out, whenever you hear some manager, or safety officer talking about “zero accidents” as a company objective, you know  it’s not so much worker safety they have in minds but are simply virtue-signalling to the Labour department and OSH -- oblivious to the fact that the more silly rules they make, the more workers disengage and the less they respect real health and safety.

And more obviously, why is it we assume that what these wallies call “best practice” is anything of the sort. What, you wonder, gives them any special expertise at a job you have often done for many more years than they have?

So we can laugh, and we can call pictures like the car in the ditch “irony.”

But is it really just irony?

Is it just irony that in the first Christchurch earthquakes, one of the buildings too damaged for occupation was the only-recently-opened Christchurch Civic Centre – a $120 million palace that the Building Code the council themselves administer requires be designed to still be functional after a quake … and for several months it wasn’t functional at all.

Is it just irony that some of the worst-damaged Wellington buildings in the recent quakes were those occupied by councils – including the six-storey civic administration building on Civic Square that has been closed ever since and will probably be demolished, and the Greater Wellington Council on severely damaged fill at Thorndon Quay.

Is it just irony that the the Auckland council building at Graham Street that houses its building inspectors bears the same failing cladding system that infected so many Auckland homes, that the “old” Auckland council building on Aotea Square is uninhabitable due to its asbestos, and the “new” Auckland council building no inhabited by council egos was discovered subsequent to the council’s “due diligence” period to require around $100 million of very urgent repairs unspotted by their –un-diligent inspection teams.

Is it just irony? Or is it that the expertise so frequently assumed to reside in these buildings about these very issues may be very much less than many might suppose. It’s hard to show all of these pigs in a poke in a pic as pithy as the one at the top of this post. But the story told in each is the same. Which makes me at least wonder: why do we give these people the power to tell us how to do things.

The state, in its alleged wisdom, has granted these folks special powers on the basis that they're especially good and knowledgeable about these things. But what makes us assume that they are?

And why aren’t we entitled to be free to make our own mistakes?

They do.

And we pay for it.

Why can’t we be left alone to pay for our own mistakes? Or to devise our own very good practices for avoiding them?

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