My workplace is very safety conscious, which is laudable as we regularly deal with a wide variety of unpleasant substances that scientific tradition teaches us to treat with a cavalier attitude. This sign appears to be warning me about the slips and trips[1]. Unfortunately, what one says and what one means are not always the same thing.
Rather than telling me the injury risk from a slip/trip, this sign simply informs me that, were I to suffer a major injury in a fall, the injury is overwhelmingly likely to be a fracture[2]. Given that other major injury options include head trauma and death, fractures seem like the major injury that should result from a fall in a relatively safe environment.
Personally, as a worker hoping to avoid a major injury due to a fall onto my expansive ass[3], what I want from a workplace is a low frequency of “slips and trips” and, when a fall occurs, that no injuries are more frequent than minor injuries which are more frequent than major injuries. To make this more clear (i.e., less clear) I’ve created a mathematical abstraction of the system to guide further analysis of this important issue.
The risk of a fall resulting in a fracture during a workday is:
Ft=s*i*m*f,
where s is the probability of a fall during the workday, i is the probability of an injury of any degree, m is the probability of an injury being a major injury, and f is the probability of a major injury being a fracture (according to the poster f=0.8).
So, for a safe workplace, minimize s, i, and m, while maximizing f, which is essentially the opposite of what my sign was focusing on[4].
NOTES
- Slip, think banana peel. Trip, think high school bully in a crowded hall.
- What it really says is that the fall causes an unknown major injury, which then causes a fracture in a physiologically dubious manner.
- Resulting in glutteal hematoma, a minor injury for Cate Blanchett, a major injury for Jennifer Lopez.
- Yup, that was a preposition. At the end of a sentence. What are you going to do about it.
The Finch and Pea 