Health and Safety Signs

As I’ve written before, my current workplace has an unhealthy (and frankly ridiculous) obsession with health and safety, and particularly with regard to warning signs. They haven’t yet put ‘danger of electric shock’ on all the plug sockets, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

We’re not even allowed to use light switches. Instead, the office has automatic sensors, and if nothing’s moving near those sensors, the light goes out. So far, so green, and all well and good. It can be weird if you’re the only person in a section of the office, and the lights start going out all round you, but there we go, that’s the way it is.

However, the lights in the toilets also work like this. Which again isn’t so bad in general. It means the energy doesn’t get wasted, blah blah. But the sensors are quite a way inside the toilet room, by five or six paces. So you go in, the door closes, you walk forwards, and then the light goes on.

Perceptive readers may have seen the flaw here.

Today, the toilet floor had been mopped, and was slippy. So the cleaners put up a little sign to warn people the floor was wet – as per Health and Safety.

Only, because the light was off when I went in, and walked forwards, rather than slipping on a wet floor (which had dried off in the meantime) instead I tripped over the fucking warning sign, which I didn’t see before the light went on.

I haven’t yet decided whether to report this as a problem…