For those of you who don't know me, I worked for 7 1/2 years in the Environmental Health and Safety office at a major university in central Illinois. While my background isn't in this field, and by all means I don't consider myself anything close to being an expert in this field, I did learn a few things while working in this office. Enough to know that Asia is a safety person's worse nightmare! This means that since living in China for 9 months and now in India for 7 months, I pretty much have to mentally block out the fact that I know anything at all about safety. Safety just isn't a concept here that has been accepted...not even close to being practiced at all.
While I was in Illinois last month, I had the opportunity to visit with some of my former co-workers from my EHS working days. I was telling them a few of things that I see here on a regular basis, and that they couldn't even fathom all of the safety violations that they would see in just one block here. One of my former co-workers (and still a good friend) actually retired at the end of December, and now I'm trying to talk her into visiting me here.
Colleen and I at her retirement party. By the way Colleen, I'm still waiting on my prize for traveling the longest distance to attend your party!
Anyway, on returning back to our house from our trip, I found that one of our bathroom doors wouldn't open. To make a long story short, someone from the lock company finally came out this week to look at the bathroom door handle. After banging on the handle with a hammer and jiggling the door for about 2o minutes, and it still not opening, he finally determined the handle was broke and would have to be replaced. Duh! I could have told him that! Replacing the door handle turned into a major ordeal just to get the old handle off of the door. He finally had to pull out his electric drill. I was quite impressed that he had one as power tools here in India aren't that common. Then he went to plug it in, and I just about died when I saw what he was doing. I was dying to take some photos, but I didn't want to explain why I wanted photos of him changing the door handle. Luckily for me, his drill bit broke, and he had to go get another one. Perfect time for me to take photos.
Anyway, on returning back to our house from our trip, I found that one of our bathroom doors wouldn't open. To make a long story short, someone from the lock company finally came out this week to look at the bathroom door handle. After banging on the handle with a hammer and jiggling the door for about 2o minutes, and it still not opening, he finally determined the handle was broke and would have to be replaced. Duh! I could have told him that! Replacing the door handle turned into a major ordeal just to get the old handle off of the door. He finally had to pull out his electric drill. I was quite impressed that he had one as power tools here in India aren't that common. Then he went to plug it in, and I just about died when I saw what he was doing. I was dying to take some photos, but I didn't want to explain why I wanted photos of him changing the door handle. Luckily for me, his drill bit broke, and he had to go get another one. Perfect time for me to take photos.
Here's a photo of the door, and the drill plugged in. Look closely at the drill setup. Do you see anything wrong with this picture? In case you can't see it very well, here are some close up photos.
Hmmm...like I said, I'm no expert in safety, but I'm pretty sure that this isn't a good safe setup. My door got fixed though, and no one was electrocuted in the process, so I guess that's all that matters. Another successful day of life in India.
2 comments:
looks like your brother was working for you!
dad
You write very well.
Post a Comment