A PSA.

[theweaselking]

CANADIANS understand how public service announcements work. (Warning: Music, sound, and it's a Canadian "workplace safety" PSA. Those are generally pretty gruesome.)

We've gotten the practice at making them good, from centuries of experience in teaching our children to avoid the moose.

Here's another example - it's a catechism that we ensure all schoolchildren know by heart, by the time they're able to spell their own names:
Q: What do we do when we are awake?
A: Keep two eyes on the sky.
Q: What do we do when we sleep?
A: Keep one eye on the sky.
Q: What do we do when we see the moose?
A: Dig hard, dig deep, go for shelter, and never look back.

Comments

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

*Boggle*

I'm torn on this. One the one hand, there are a lot of accidents that really shouldn't have happened. In a moderate amount of driving yesterday I witnessed two people being loaded into ambulances and several extremely bad car accidents that had already been dealt with. I also saw a lot of other drivers blatantly ignoring road conditions and putting themselves and everyone around them at risk.

On the other hand, using fear and horror as educational tools is arguable. This commercial didn't even finish telling us the risks that led to the accident and how it could have been prevented. The shock and awe took precedence over the actual education. Presumably, it's something they think is limited to professional kitchens and thus people in those industries will keep them in mind, but similar principles apply to the home as well, and I would have benefitted from that far more than from scare tactics.

[buck-x.livejournal.com]

the ad series features different work settings including retail and industrial.

a 30-second spot isn't the greatest way to educate people about workplace hazards, but it is good as a "heads-up" to employers AND employees. the companion website (prevent-it.ca) offers more in the way of education.

i work in a kitchen.
that video scared the piss out of me, and definitely got my attention.

the commercials are produced by Ontario's Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, so that's why they're focused on the workplace, and not the home.

[hakerh.livejournal.com]

Jesus. That's a hell of a PSA. Shock & awe isn't the bes format for, say, a half-hour training video, but as buck_x said, it certainly caught my attention too.

[itlandm.livejournal.com]

Awesome! There are more of these?

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. All bloody and gory.

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

But at the same time, my woodshop teacher scared the hell out of me on my first day of class, and I can guarantee that I have never in my life forgotten to tie back my hair or wear protective equipment while handling power tools.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

...she explicitly tells you she should have cleaned up the grease and says that the deep fryer is too close to something. Honestly, I don't think it's a difficult leap for anyone to conclude that the appliance that involves hot grease, mentioned in the context of a grease spill, is placed somewhere where if it spills or splashes then it's bloody dangerous because people can slip.

And she slips on the grease spill that should not have been there and was only there because she didn't keep the workplace clean, and boils her face off.

It's not simply an "OMG kitchens are teh horrible!"--it explains what went wrong and shows you why grease spills (and, by extension, slippery floors) in the kitchen are dangerous.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the site, I'll look into it because I think the same principles apply at the home as well.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

It's the something they cut off that I want to understand. Of course, my home isn't similar to a professional kitchen, but understanding how a specific accident can be prevented helps me understand how to prevent accidents in general.

I think the accident was supposed to be her face going into the deep fat fryer as she fell, but large are scalding from the soup she was carrying is equally possible. That's really just a meaningless details observation, though.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

> Of course, my home isn't similar to a professional kitchen, but
> understanding how a specific accident can be prevented helps me
> understand how to prevent accidents in general.

Keep floors from getting slippery (in this specific case, by cleaning up grease spills and not putting the deep-fat fryer in an inconvenient location).

Swear to god, that's the general principle that can be inferred.

> I think the accident was supposed to be her face going into the
> deep fat fryer as she fell,

Rewatched it twice, and I'm really not seeing that.

She's carrying a huge pot. She clearly slips on the stain on the floor, which she has just explained is about to be the cause of her accident. She falls backwards, the contents of the huge pot slop up and over her and one of the huge appliances in the back (apparently a stove, since those tend to have heating elements on top and *something* causes the contents to catch fire), and the closest she ever gets to any of the big appliances is when her left shoulder bounces off the one to her left on the way down.

> That's really just a meaningless details observation, though.

Well, it makes the difference between "This is why you shouldn't have slippery floors" and "Deep-fat fryers are dangerous, although we're showing you something that only mentions them in possible relation to the grease stain on the floor."

[harald387.livejournal.com]

From my experience working in kitchens, it'd be pretty much impossible to faceplant in a deep fat fryer if you fell. She's pretty clearly slipping on a grease stain and dumping hot substance all over herself, and the issue with the fryers being close to something is "the stove", because grease spills near the fryer aren't uncommon, and you're frequently carrying heavy dangerous things around the stove.

(Edited because I managed to leave out part of a sentence.)

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Additional careful rewatching:

I'm pretty sure the appliance behind the stove to her left is one of those huge black-top frying surfaces--you can see it earlier in the PSA. Completely flat, and not a deep-fat fryer. (The Extreme Pita where I eat lunch has one of those--basically a frying pan the size of a countertop section. Dangerous in its own right, but not a fryer and not inherently greasy, especially since a lot of places just use water or pickle juice to get the sizzle.)

I think the things to her right are the fryers, but I'm basing that off a Google image search.

...man, these terror and pain PSAs really get people's attention...

[argaive.livejournal.com]

Ow.

That certainly got my attention.

I think putting people face to face with the possible consequences of negligence is far more effective than merely explaining what might happen.

Reign of Antlers?

A.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

I still think there's more to be learned from the finer details, especially about keeping certain things separate to reduce the risk of injury. As an example, in looking into this I learned that water should never be boiled in a microwave. That stemmed directly from trying to understand the details, albeit as a complete tangent. This might be a difference of opinion, though.

I don't see her face going into the deep fryer either, but she fell sideways towards what could be a deep fryer. I think that was the accident they tried to portray based on the quick flash of injuries. I have difficulty picturing the kind of exposed burns they picture stemming from quick exposure to boiling water, but I can easily see it coming from boiling oil, and there is a flame burst so there's something flammable there. That said, we don't know if that really was water in that pot or something completely different. I'm not not an EMT or medical professional, my experience is based on injuries I sustained being splashed with a similar quantity of boiling water, so I may be completely mistakened.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

Entirely possible.

And I have to agree, they're unquestionably effective at getting people's attention and consideration.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear it. *Shudder*

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Couple of clarifications:

I am assured by someone who has actually worked in a kitchen that those things to our left at 18 seconds are not deep-fat fryers. (I persist in reading them as such, and vaguely wonder if we're not shown the fryers because a properly laid-out kitchen wouldn't have them in a dangerous place and they used a real kitchen rather than mocking up a set, but that is a sidenote.)

And it's not the contents of the pot which catch fire--if you watch, you can see that she flips a pan when she hits the stove on the way down, and it's the stuff from that that splashes back and lights up. My bad.

...I need to stop watching this thing.

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

Boiling water will do that to your skin very quickly. It's more or less a 2nd degree burn with the blisters popped open. Steam and hot water injuries are some of the most overlooked, and thus the 2nd most common burn injury that is taught in first aid behind sunburn. Holding your arm over steam for less than 5 seconds can give you a second degree burn. That pot of water was ample to do the damage it did. And then even after the source of heat is gone, your tissues continue to burn because of the heat transferred to your skin, so her face is actually going to get worse.

The fire flareup looks like she hit a frying pan on the way down and upended oil onto a grill or something. That could have actually gone way worse, because if the grease lights on fire and water is added, then the flaming grease actually floats on the water and becomes really hard to contain.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

She falls sideways and back. Here's a deep-fat fryer:



Her face didn't go into one of those on the way down, and she didn't get back up after she was lying on the floor. What she hit on the way down was a stove, not a fryer. I'm not seeing any reason to assume an accident caused by falling into a fryer. Heck, even the accident didn't look severe enough--you could still see bits of pink on her face under the blisters, and she had all her hair.

(You poured up to twenty-five gallons of boiling water, which may have been hotter than 100' Celsius (because a solute solution can actually exceed the boiling point of water) onto your face, and you call it a splash? I am stunned, and a little impressed.)

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

Closer to 15 gallons across my arm, but yes. It was about as unpleasant as is to be expected. I expect the difference is the amount of surface area, my arm is a quarter to a third the width of my face and so there is a huge difference in the amount of heat transferred into tissue.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

I stand corrected. Thanks!

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

I just noticed the pan myself.

"...I need to stop watching this thing."

Ditto.

[calysto.livejournal.com]

criminy.

and they say Americans live in a violent culture.

[clinkerfiasco.livejournal.com]

Side note: I live in Quebec and most movies that are rated R everywhere else, are rated G here. ;)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Uh, yeah. Rating things up for sex and swearing in Quebec is like wearin a raincoat in the shower.

[jerril]

I really shouldn't have watched that. Falling is one of my "OMGWTFBBQAAAUGH" triggers. Falling onto things or having dangerous items that you're carrying attack you when you fall? Very special hell.

TWITCH.

(The scene in Unbreakable when "Mr. Glass" falls down the stairs? AAAAUGH)