A couple of years ago, I bristled at a fellow employee berating me for running up the stairs at work and not using the handrail. I argued that using stairs is something that we educated people should be trusted to be able to do without the need for further instruction or the helping hand of a corporate mother-figure. Apparently I was wrong.
At my last location (which I’ve thankfully now vacated – geez, what a deathtrap that turns out to have been!) there were signs aplenty around the stairwells (of this two-story building!) advising people to hold the handrail, watch their step, call Building Services for assistance in transferring anything more than a sheet of paper between floors, and so on. There was also a running tally of staircase accidents that had taken place at this facility pinned to the wall right by the staircase itself - presumably as a shock tactic in the vein of those color pictures of diseased lungs they started putting on cigarette packets in England. This listed some almost a dozen stair-related accidents in the past year or so. And these were not just simple slips, but full-blown accidents.  There were at least four broken bones (including one nose!), a couple of twisted ankles, and a torn ligament, all necessitating time off work (which is, after all, why the company really cares…).
Corporate-wide, in my part of the organization alone (the IT group – things are apparently much, much safer at the refineries and plants) there were 18 staircase-related injuries in 2007, and there have been another 13 accidents year-to-date in 2008.  And then this week, at my new location, we had another one. Apparently some plonker forgot how his legs worked and dived head first down a flight of 13 (unlucky for some!) stairs into the parking lot, necessitating a trip to the emergency room and time off work. So I take it all back. The company is perfectly right to focus on ‘stair safety’ to such great lengths. Employees apparently really are that stupid, and really do need to be taught how to use stairs (they’ve only existed since the time of cavemen, one can be forgiven for not being familiar with them..).
Management, unsurprisingly, is freaking out about this, and the various safety reps are falling over themselves backwards (figuratively of course; literally falling over backwards is frowned upon as an unsafe act, especially on stairs) to come up with new ‘initiatives’ to combat this scourge of the modern workplace. One enterprising manager even took a new twist (pun intended) on it all by proffering advice to the company at large on how to tackle spiral staircases! (Of which, it should be noted, we have none at any location I’ve ever worked in.) But these are clearly desperate times which call for desperate measures – and certainly a more proactive approach than just sending out a couple of e-mails advising people to “be careful”.
My immediate suggestion would have been to simply replace all of the staircases with escalators to avoid all of that troublesome knee-bending, but we’d only end up with people dithering around the start of the escalator unsure about how to take that first step onto a moving object, much like a toddler on its first trip to the mall, or old people who lose all concept of time and space after a certain age. Or people would get their shoelaces (or high-heels) caught in the bit at the bottom, resulting in pile-ups and even more injuries. No, if we can’t master the ‘manual’ version there’s no way we’re going to get the hang of the ‘high-tech’ version.
There’s only one thing for it. We have to remove all of the staircases from the workplace. We could simply seal off the upper floors of all of our buildings (much like the Bakersfield Hotel in Bakersfield, CA did when told it didn’t have a fire permit for the full three-story building, so it just closed the top story and reapplied for a two-story license), but then we’d be crammed three to an office on the ground floor, and I’m not sharing! The clear alternative is to build wheelchair ramps up to all storeys above the first floor. (“Whoa there, slopes? Sounds tricky! Can you train me on it?”). Of course the ramps up to the 11th floor would have to start some way back (unless we fit a spiraling one to the outside of the building, like a giant helter-skelter) but at least we’ll have removed the danger of those tricky stair things.
We’d also leave ourselves open to invasion by the Daleks (the aberration of the ‘floating’ one on the last series of Dr. Who has been wiped from my mind as a cop-out), but let’s face it, if we’re too stupid to be able to climb a flight of stairs without injuring ourselves, we deserve to be conquered by aliens. Or any other race, for that matter. You never hear of any other animals breaking their legs on something as simple as a staircase, do you? Mountain goats even manage to traverse slopes without the use of steps at all. Clearly it’s time to revoke our claim to being the Master Race, and hand over the mantel to a species more qualified. So let’s all bow down before our vertically-moving superiors, the cockroaches. They can climb stairs, and fly!
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