Yesterday and today it was all about communication. It was about my annual presentation and it was about the phone I found. I’ll start at the beginning.
I may have mentioned a few days ago that the staff and supervisors where I work each preside over a monthly safety meeting where all of the shop floor employees attend and we try to make them safe. The subject for October was hand safety and the presenter was yours truly.
Let me preface this by saying that Jimbo was never noted as a great orator. Let me further go on to say that Jimbo is less than an adequate public speaker. Oh, heck, let’s not sugarcoat this. Jimbo gets nervous and forgets what he is going to say and, in general doesn’t come off as being intelligent. I didn’t sleep well the night before. I spent a lot of time doing research and setting up my presentation on PowerPoint, inserting a number of pictures into my slides. I decided to lead off my presentation with the story of my hurting my hand last Friday night.
We are assigned shop floor workers to be our teammates and we had a meeting last week to discuss the presentation and for them to give me ideas. One of my teammates, Ron, told me that we had a boring subject. Another teammate, Elbert, told me that half of the people sleep through the safety meeting, anyway. My third teammate, Doris, reminded me about an hour before the presentation that the month before last, the day shift workers got hostile and shouted down the speaker. She said she expected the same would happen to me. My already-shaken confidence began to wane.
When it came time to give my presentation, I got off to a reasonably good start and I was able to tell my story fluently. As I got toward the end of my story and was a few minutes from presenting my statistics, I began to see a loss of interest in the faces of the crowd. I knew after I had used up all the story about the emergency room and the pain and the blood of life streaming from my broken body, there would not be enough no-doz in the world to keep these people awake. Ruth, a machine operator to whom I speak every day and who seems to like me, was in a chair next to the wall and she was using the wall as a pillow. Dreams of the end of the workday were dancing in her unconscious head. I ended the story of my injury by showing the slide of the utility knife blade, which I posted on this site a few days back.
Instead of saying “this is the utility knife blade that cut me,” I decided to wake them up.
“This is the little rat bastard that got me,” I said.
There was a wave of laughter and I paused for a moment and sort of waited for the commotion to stop. I saw a dozen pairs of sleeping eyes open to the conscious world. Ruth sat upright, faced me and never went to sleep again. People actually began to listen to me and I was able to make a lot of eye contact, working about 75% of the rest of my presentation without reading from my notes.
Did you know there were 4.4 million on-the-job injuries reported in 2003, the last year for which we have complete data, and that one out of four work-related injuries involved the hands, fingers or wrists.
I felt that if I got someone’s attention, and they listened to what I told them about working safely, then I was successful. They clapped when I was finished.
I went and sat down beside the guy who is temporarily in charge and he told me not to use the expression “rat bastard,” so I didn’t when I made my presentation to the night shift. I don’t think I did as well with them and I don’t think they paid attention like the day shift did.
If that little rat bastard made someone listen and, by listening, they pay attention to working safe, then that little rat bastard did his job.
I was on the way to work by six this morning, so I could make my third and last presentation to the graveyard shift. A few blocks from home, there was an open, clamshell cellular phone in the middle of the street. There was no traffic, so I drove up to it and picked it up. It was open and on, but I didn’t see anyone around. I decided I would try to find the owner after work, because I had to get to work and get the laptop and projector set up for my PowerPoint presentation. The boss wasn’t there for my final performance, so I called the rat bastard a rat bastard. We gave the abbreviated version and I don’t know how well we got through, but I was glad to have it out of the way for this year. A couple of people on the shop floor made comments today about the rat bastard, so I’m convinced they were listening. I hope they listened all the way through.
When I got in my car to leave work tonight the cell phone I found was ringing and I answered it. A little girl on the other end didn’t seem to know what to say, so I told her where I found the phone and got her home number and told her I’d call when I got home. When I called, her mother answered and we met at a local park and I gave her the phone.
Well, two good deeds done, so now I guess I can go out and do something bad. Well, probably not.
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