Surely safety officers don’t have wives?

IT used to be counsellors. Then it was people who wrote self-help books.

There’s always some group in society that we can all hate cheerfully together.

I’d like to suggest safety officers.

I know, I know… they do a good job. Where would we be without them? They are performing a Valuable Service people need. They are Protecting Us From Ourselves.

That’s what they said about counsellors and self-help authors and it wasn’t true then either.

Actually, safety officers are a scourge.

You can’t like safety officers. If I had my way I’d gather up all the safety officers in the world and shut them in a building together. I’d lay trip wires in office corridors, carpet warehouse floors with banana skins and leave rakes lying on the ground with the prongs upwards.

Low beams would brain them and doors would open suddenly and squash their noses.

You may think I’ve had a bad experience with a safety officer.

Well, yes, actually. The man was an idiot. The telephone on my desk, you see, is on the left, or it was. I don’t pick it up with that hand. I pick it up with the right. So I moved the phone. That meant moving the telephone cord behind me.

Which caused the unctious little twerp to suggest it was a danger.

“No it’s not.”

“I’m afraid there’s a risk you might trip over it,” he cooed.

“Go away. I’m busy. I have better things to do. You have safer things to do.”

He smiled the smile of the powerful and sidled away.

Today my telephone is back on the left and the cord is nailed down. I can’t even strangle him with it any more.

This has been going on for as long as people have, of course. Give a little power to a moron and it goes to their head. I was going to say, to their brain, but that’s ridiculous.

It used to be the same with bus conductors and librarians. It still is with dental receptionists.

The trouble is – they’re right! That’s what makes them so bloody unbearable. Of course work places are unsafe. Of course you should wear goggles when you use an angle grinder. Of course you shouldn’t open the two top drawers on a filing cabinet because it might fall over and break someone’s legs.

Even if it is the safety officer’s.

But it’s real life we’re talking about.

What must these people’s homes look like, for heaven’s sake!

The walls and the floors must be antiseptic with polish (but not shiny. You never know what might happen on a shiny floor) and there can’t be an item that isn’t glued down on any surface.

I bet they change into white coats before they open the front door. Their wives… (great scott, they couldn’t have wives, could they?) but if they did have wives the poor buggers would never be allowed to chop an onion or plug in a kettle. Not without filling in a form in triplicate; and wearing steel-capped boots, industrial gloves, overalls, goggles and a hard hat.

That’s the trouble, you see – no one thanks you for being right. The man who says after the accident, “I told you so,” is not a modern Nostradamus. He’s a smug bastard and we want to hit him.

Quite reasonably in my view.

So spare me from the puritanical virtue of safety officers. I don’t need to be reminded I am a danger to myself and to others. I have a wife to do that. Also a toaster with a frayed electrical cord, and a ladder with a rung missing. I may not live long. And if the safety officer comes near me again, neither will he.

But I bet I’ll have more fun.