The Sky Is My Garden: Safety Third

Saturday, November 30, 2019

Safety Third

This is a story about safety bricks.

Rest easy if you are unfamiliar with safety bricks. To my knowledge, they are used in only one location worldwide. As it turns out, that location happens to be the very house where I was invited for Thanksgiving dinner.

When I arrived for dinner, I walked around an island countertop in the kitchen to set a bottle of wine on a clear spot near the back of the counter. I nearly tripped over a wooden crate filled with four bricks. The crate rested on the corner of an area rug and occupied the center of the walking space between the kitchen table and the counter.

“Whoa!” I called out to Randy, the person occupying in the house. “What’s the deal with these bricks?”

“They are to keep people from tripping,” he responded.

“Wait?…what?...how does that work?”

“The carpet curls up at that corner. I put the bricks there so people don’t trip.”

“But…the bricks…you know…I almost…” I sputtered.

Randy, sensing my confusion, removed the bricks.

Sure enough, as soon as traffic patterns in the kitchen shifted people back to the table, people began tripping on the lifted carpet.

Eventually, Randy placed the box of bricks back on the carpet. Traffic patterns began to flow uneasily around the bricks, but nobody tripped.

Safety bricks.

Safety can be a curious thing. In this case, something about the conspicuous nature of the box worked.

As a point of fact, almost tripping is not tripping.

The lifted carpet did not catch attention properly, but the bricks worked as something of an attention-getter. A safety barrier, if you will.

Maybe safety isn’t always what you think it is. Or what you think it should be.

Posted immediately below are a couple photographs I captured of the safety bricks with my smarter-than-me-phone. Below those, I have posted a video of Mike Rowe (of Dirty Jobs fame) explaining his “Safety Third” concept. In a way, safety third is something akin to the box of bricks.