Are you risk averse ?

[fizzwheel]

Maybe its me, I'm starting to loose the will to live with the risk averse society I find myself living in.

Some recent examples

1. Signs put up at work warning that the water out the hot tap maybe "hot"

2. More signs put up at work, detailing in great depth how Office Christmas decoations should be deployed. I mean do we really need a whole page of AR instructions being printed out and stuck up saying where to put tinsel etc etc

3. People worrying about how "the roads are icey" and coming in to work late or in a state of panic about getting home again.

4. My current head of dept, wont let any changes go through on our system at the moment without a battle, because "stuff might go wrong"

I find myself getting exasperated by it all, Life has a certain amount of risk in anything that you do, you can't avoid it. The only way of avoiding it is to do nothing and that seems what people are seemingly happy to do.

Its driving me nuts. I dont want to live in a world where I'm wrapped in cotto wool, just because somebody somewhere has decided that sticking a bit of tinsel up and having a few christmas tree lights on is "Risky and might cause somebody harm"

FFS

/rant mode off

Fizz i know how you feel my whole working day is risk assessed

[Viney]

There was a programme on the other day about Helat and Safety, the fun police, i believe it was called. I watched about 2 minutes of it before i started shouting loudly at the TV calling then naffin stupid, then turning over. Its beyond a joke.

As for your IT thing Fizz, L&G have a change freeze for 4 week over christmas starting tomorrow!

Our change freeze started on Monday, and lasts until mid January, although we can get some "Emergency" changes through if we get the appropriate level of sign-off, I can totally understand this as it could be very costly if we had an outage of our systems during this period.

However I totally agree regarding the other pointless HSE political correctness that goes on, absolutely ridiculous half the time.

People should use common sense, but I guess there is a shortage of that about!!

I'm not adverse to risk, I quite enjoy it sometimes.

It's occasionally required in IT too, there are times when things need to be done by the book, and times when things need to be done, regardless of regulation, rules, etc.

If you need to stand on a desk to reach a projector, its really quite safe most of the time. If you need to rackmount that 1u server and no one else is around is it going to cause issues... Or if you need to restart a system daemon with no one noticing and no downtime...

You have to be sensible about these things, unfortunately a lot of people are not. Now, im not entirely sure if this is because they dont understand proper risk management (read, common sense), or they are scared and want to cover their own ****, or are just taken in by the whole health and safety peoples belittling of poeple doing what people do.

I read about another case in the metro this morning, a lollypop man was ordered to remove tinsel from his sign, due to a complaint.

Dan

Cardboard coffee cups "Warning! Contents may be hot"
They had bloody well better be.

Originally Posted by Sudoxe

... things need to be done, regardless of regulation, rules, etc.

If you need to stand on a desk to reach a projector, its really quite safe most of the time. If you need to rackmount that 1u server and no one else is around is it going to cause issues... Or if you need to restart a system daemon with no one noticing and no downtime...

Damn you Sudoxe, this is the final straw! I need your gun and your badge. You're a good cop, but you need to learn to play it by the book!

i think its astonishing the human race has survived this long. we need people to make us aware of the risks involved in day to day life. why it was only yesterday i stood up too quickly and went a little bit dizzy, i had to check myself lest i fell over. and i could have been carrying a flask or anything. a baby even. were there any signs warning me? nope.

so shut ya traps all of you and embrace these do gooders and safety nazis, give them a hug, they're humans too. dont squeeze too hard, you may break a rib of theirs

Originally Posted by Bear

Damn you Sudoxe, this is the final straw! I need your gun and your badge. You're a good cop, but you need to learn to play it by the book!

You think im joking...i'm sure they have a full policy & risk assessment on changing light bulbs here, they have one on everything else...

[fizzwheel]

Originally Posted by Viney

As for your IT thing Fizz, L&G have a change freeze for 4 week over christmas starting tomorrow!

We dont have a change freeze at the moment, I'd understand if we did. I put a change in, and it got rejected, because "You might break something"

Its broken now, It needs fixing, if we dont fix it, Its going to hold up a project thats already 3 months late even more.

Its driving me nuts !!!