Tag Archives: Safety Signs

When Power Plant Competition Turns Terribly Safe

Favorites Post #20

Originally posted June 6, 2014;

I’m sure the plant manager at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma thought that a little competition might just do our Safety Program a little good. The maintenance crews always knew what they were going to be doing first thing on Monday morning. They were going to attend a Safety Meeting with their team. All of the maintenance crews attended a team safety meeting every Monday morning to remind them to be safe during the week. This had been going on for at least 9 years at the power plant. Every Monday morning we all looked forward to the 30 minutes we would spend reminding ourselves to be safe that week.

It didn’t seem to matter if I was on the Summer Help yard crew, or a janitor, on the labor crew or an electrician. The Monday Morning safety meetings were all pretty much the same. Someone would read from a Safety pamphlet that each of the foreman would receive once each month. We would try to read one of the articles each week in order to stretch it out so that it lasted the entire month of Monday Morning Safety Meetings. This often meant that we would be listening to a completely irrelevant safety article that really didn’t apply to us.  But that was all right because it still reminded us to think about safety everywhere we went.

Some of the articles were things that reminded us to be safe in the work place. Other articles reminded us to clean up the kitchen counter after you have finished cutting up the chicken in order to cook fried chicken for dinner. The chicken juices could lead to food poisoning if they sat there for a while and then some other food was placed on the same counter if it was still soaked in juices from the chicken. We justified to ourselves that it didn’t hurt to remind ourselves about things like this because if we went home and had food poisoning by not washing our chicken juices, then it could be as serious as a lost workday accident on the job.

When I joined the electric shop, I used to keep a stack of all the Safety Pamphlets. Who knew if they would ever come in handy. Years later when I left the Power Plant to pursue another career I left the stack behind in case some other safety zealot needed some motivating safety material. I tried to find a picture of the safety pamphlets that we used to read on Google, but I could only find Safety Pamphlets that were more colorful and had more eye-catching covers. The only aesthetic difference between our safety pamphlets from one month to the other consisted of using a different color font. So, one month, the pamphlet would be written in blue. The next month, green. Then red. Maybe purple some times. The December one would have a little drawing of holly at the top. That was about as exciting as they were.

Occasionally the foreman would get a different kind of safety pamphlet on a certain topic. Instead of changing the font color, this pamphlet would change the background color to one bright solid color. I could find a picture of one of these:

Wouldn't want to make the cover any more interesting. It might take away from the message

Wouldn’t want to make the cover any more interesting. It might take away from the message

In the first paragraph I mentioned that the maintenance crews generally knew what they would be doing right off the bat on Monday morning when their work day began. Yep. They would spend 15 to 30 minutes staring off into space while their foreman, or the designated hypnotist would read a safety pamphlet in a monotone voice. I think it was permitted to fall asleep as long as you didn’t snore. Once you snored it was too hard to claim that your eyes were closed only so that you could better picture how to lift with your legs and not your back.

In order to add something dynamic to the Monday Morning Safety Meeting, it was decided that some friendly competition might help. So, here is what happened:

A Safety Committee was formed and their task was to collect safety slogans from the teams and once each month they would decide which slogan was the best and then it would become the “Safety Slogan of the Month”. Then for the next month this particular safety slogan would be posted on all the bulletin boards throughout the plant. At the end of the year, a winner was selected from the 12 winning Monthly Safety Slogans. Whichever team won the safety slogan of the year award would be honored with a free Pizza (or two) for lunch.

Power Plant Pepperoni Pizza

Power Plant Pepperoni Pizza

A noble attempt at trying to add a little spice (and tomato sauce) into the safety program.

At first our team didn’t give this much thought. I was one of the first people from the electric shop on the committee and since I was on the committee, I didn’t think it would be fair to submit a safety slogan myself, because I would have to be one of the people voting on it. One person from each area was on the Safety Committee. One person from each of the three A foremen’s teams in the Maintenance shop. One person from the Instrument and Controls team and one electrician. One person from the office area. One from the warehouse. There might have been one person from the Chemistry Lab, but since there were only three chemists, I’m not sure how long that lasted.

Anyway, sometime in March, 1992, when we were sitting in a Monday Morning Safety Meeting staring blankly at the only thing moving in the room besides the lips of the Safety Article Hypnotist, a black beetle scurrying across the floor, Andy Tubbs finally broke through our hypnotic state by making a suggestion. He said, “How about we start entering safety slogans for the Safety Slogan Contest and try to win the free pizza at the end of the year? Instead of just sitting here on Monday Mornings doing the same thing over and over, let’s spend our time brainstorming Safety Slogans!”

This of course was a brilliant idea. It meant that we would actually be blurting out all kinds of goofy safety slogans until we hit on a really good one to turn in for the month. We began immediately. I was the scribe capturing all the creativity that suddenly came popping up from no where. Andy was real quick to come up with some. Others took their time, but when they spoke they usually had a pretty clever safety slogan.

By the end of the first day we had about 10 new safety slogans to choose from. We picked the best one of the bunch and turned it in at the front office. I don’t remember the specific safety slogan we started out with, but I do remember some of them that the team invented. Here are a couple unique slogans that I have always remembered – not written by me….

“Lift with your legs, not with your back, or you may hear a Lumbar crack.”

“Wear skin protection in Oklahoma or you may get Melanoma.”  (Ben Davis came up with that one).

I invite anyone at the plant that remembers more slogans to add them to the Comments below….

You can see that we tried to take a standard safety slogan like “Lift with Your Legs and Not your Back” and added a clever twist to it. I had taken out the stack of safety pamphlets from the cabinet and we reviewed them. Each of them had a safety slogan on the back. We weren’t going to use any that were already written, but it gave us ideas for new slogans.

We won the Monthly Safety Slogan that month. So, we figured we were on a roll. The next month we picked our next best one. By that time we must have come up with over 25 pretty good safety slogans, and we figured we would enter our best one each month. We were in for a little surprise.

After submitting a real humdinger of a Safety Slogan the second month (something like, “Wear your Eye Protection at work so you can See Your Family at Home” — well. I just made that up. I don’t remember the exact slogan 22 years later), the slogan that won that month was a much more bland slogan than our clever one. We felt slighted. So, we talked to Jimmy Moore (I believe) who was the electrician on the other team of Electricians in our shop that was on the Safety Committee selecting the safety slogans this year. He said that there were some people on the committee that thought it wasn’t good for the same team to win two times in a row. Others thought that any one team should only be able to win once a year.

As it turned out, we were able to win the monthly safety slogan only a few more times that year only because we were the only team that turned in a safety slogan during those months.

When it came time for picking the winning safety slogan for the year, Sue Schritter’s slogan from the warehouse won even though it was fairly lame compared to the clever ones we had been turning in. (Note the warehouse and the front office were all under the same manager…. so, when one of them won, they both really did). So, the front office (slash) warehouse were able to enjoy the free pizza.

After complaining about the process at the beginning of the next year, we were determined that we were going to do what it took to win every single month and that way they would have to give us the pizza at the end of the year. So, in 1993 that was our goal.

It was determined at the beginning of the year that all safety slogans would be judged without knowing who had turned them in. It was also determined that a team could turn in as many safety slogans as they wanted each month (probably because we had complained that our team was unfairly being singled out).

So, we made a concerted effort to turn in at least 15 safety slogans each month. That way, the odds of one of ours being picked would be very high, especially since our team was the only team that was really serious about wanting to win the free pizza at the end of the year.

Gary Wehunt from our team was on the committee selecting the slogans in 1993, so he would tell us about the conversations the committee was having each month when they would get together to select the slogan, and we knew it wasn’t going to be easy to win every single month.

During the year, it became a game of cat and mouse to try to win the safety slogan of the month every single month. We knew that a couple of people on the Safety Committee were doing everything they could to not pick one our our slogans. So, here is what we did… along with the best safety slogans we had, we threw in some really lame ones. I think we had some that were so bad they were nothing more than…. “Think Safety”. Our better safety slogans were more like: “Watch for Overhead Hazards! Avoid becoming Food for Buzzards” or “Wear your Safety Harness when working up high. One wrong step and you may die.” — I mean…. How could any other safety slogan compete with the likes of those?

The funny thing was that we thought that just in case the Safety Committee was trying to look for a safety slogan that our team didn’t write, they would intentionally pick a really bad one. Like “Think Safety”.

Various Safety Signs you may see around a Power Plant

Various Safety Signs you may see around a Power Plant

And it actually worked. Two months during 1993, the team actually chose a Safety Slogan that was really lame, just to try and pick the one that our team didn’t enter only to be surprised to find that it was from our team.

Through October our team had managed to win every Safety Slogan of the Month, and it looked like we were going to finally win the Safety Slogan of the Year and receive the free Pizza. I had written down every safety slogan our team had invented. We had over 425 safety slogans by that time. I had a folder in the filing cabinet with the entire list.

Then in November, the people who were on the Safety Committee who were intent on us not winning the yearly safety slogan was able to slip one by. They had submitted a safety slogan from their own team and had told a couple other people to vote for it. It didn’t take too many votes to win for the month since when we turned in 15 to 20 slogans the votes were spread out.

Most of the slogans that did receive a vote would only get one vote. So, any slogan that had two or more votes would usually win. So, all they had to do was throw together a safety slogan and tell someone else on the committee that was not happy about our team winning every month during the year, and they would win that month.

Louise Kalicki turned in a safety slogan in November. It was a simple safety slogan like “Be Safe for your family’s sake”. We had turned in a number of slogans that had said pretty much the same thing in the 400 or more slogans we had submitted, but that was the slogan that won during that month.

Well. That was all it took. When the winner of the Safety Slogan for the year was chosen, there was no way that everyone didn’t already know whose team the safety slogan was from because they had been posted on the bulletin boards throughout the year. So, you can guess what happened. After the electric shop had won 11 of the 12 safety slogans in 1993, The girls in the front office won the free pizza… again (just like they did every year).

So, what happened in 1994? Well…. That’s another story… isn’t it?

Reddy KiloWatt never takes a vacation... Oh wait... That's not a Safety Slogan.

Reddy KiloWatt never takes a vacation… Oh wait… That’s not a Safety Slogan.

Comments from the original post:

    1. Ron Kilman June 7, 2014

      Art Linkletter had it right when he said “People are funny”.

    1. BattleBlue1 June 7, 2014

      Nice! I really enjoyed this post. I work at a power plant now and this could have happened yesterday. Some things don’t change!

  1. fred June 8, 2014

    I remember one slogan that I thought of but never could get the crew to submit it. It was,
    “When it comes to safety the old cliché “NO PAIN NO GAIN” is just a crock of s**t.” I think you could have may made your record 10/2 that year.
    I do remember your crew dominating the slogan compaign.

When Power Plant Competition Turns Terribly Safe

Originally posted June 6, 2014;

I’m sure the plant manager at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma thought that a little competition might just do our Safety Program a little good. The maintenance crews always knew what they were going to be doing first thing on Monday morning. They were going to attend a Safety Meeting with their team. All of the maintenance crews attended a team safety meeting every Monday morning to remind them to be safe during the week. This had been going on for at least 9 years at the power plant. Every Monday morning we all looked forward to the 30 minutes we would spend reminding ourselves to be safe that week.

It didn’t seem to matter if I was on the Summer Help yard crew, or a janitor, on the labor crew or an electrician. The Monday Morning safety meetings were all pretty much the same. Someone would read from a Safety pamphlet that each of the foreman would receive once each month. We would try to read one of the articles each week in order to stretch it out so that it lasted the entire month of Monday Morning Safety Meetings. This often meant that we would be listening to a completely irrelevant safety article that really didn’t apply to us.

Some of the articles were things that reminded us to be safe in the work place. Other articles reminded us to clean up the kitchen counter after you have finished cutting up the chicken in order to cook fried chicken for dinner. The chicken juices could lead to food poisoning if they sat there for a while and then some other food was placed on the same counter if it was still soaked in juices from the chicken. We justified to ourselves that it didn’t hurt to remind ourselves about things like this because if we went home and had food poisoning by not washing our chicken juices, then it could be as serious as a lost workday accident on the job.

When I joined the electric shop, I used to keep a stack of all the Safety Pamphlets. Who knew if they would ever come in handy. Years later when I left the Power Plant to pursue another career I left the stack behind in case some other safety zealot needed some motivating safety material. I tried to find a picture of the safety pamphlets that we used to read on Google, but I could only find Safety Pamphlets that were more colorful and had more eye-catching covers. The only aesthetic difference between our safety pamphlets from one month to the other consisted of using a different color font. So, one month, the pamphlet would be written in blue. The next month, green. Then red. Maybe purple some times. The December one would have a little drawing of holly at the top. That was about as exciting as they were.

Occasionally the foreman would get a different kind of safety pamphlet on a certain topic. Instead of changing the font color, this pamphlet would change the background color to one bright solid color. I could find a picture of one of these:

Wouldn't want to make the cover any more interesting. It might take away from the message

Wouldn’t want to make the cover any more interesting. It might take away from the message

In the first paragraph I mentioned that the maintenance crews generally knew what they would be doing right off the bat on Monday morning when their work day began. Yep. They would spend 15 to 30 minutes staring off into space while their foreman, or the designated hypnotist would read a safety pamphlet in a monotone voice. I think it was permitted to fall asleep as long as you didn’t snore. Once you snored it was too hard to claim that your eyes were closed only so that you could better picture how to lift with your legs and not your back.

In order to add something dynamic to the Monday Morning Safety Meeting, it was decided that some friendly competition might help. So, here is what happened:

A Safety Committee was formed and their task was to collect safety slogans from the teams and once each month they would decide which slogan was the best and then it would become the “Safety Slogan of the Month”. Then for the next month this particular safety slogan would be posted on all the bulletin boards throughout the plant. At the end of the year, a winner was selected from the 12 winning Monthly Safety Slogans. Whichever team won the safety slogan of the year award would be honored with a free Pizza (or two) for lunch.

Power Plant Pepperoni Pizza

Power Plant Pepperoni Pizza

A noble attempt at trying to add a little spice (and tomato sauce) into the safety program.

At first our team didn’t give this much thought. I was one of the first people from the electric shop on the committee and since I was on the committee, I didn’t think it would be fair to submit a safety slogan myself, because I would have to be one of the people voting on it. One person from each area was on the Safety Committee. One person from each of the three A foremen’s teams in the Maintenance shop. One person from the Instrument and Controls team and one electrician. One person from the office area. One from the warehouse. There might have been one person from the Chemistry Lab, but since there were only three chemists, I’m not sure how long that lasted.

Anyway, sometime in March, 1992, when we were sitting in a Monday Morning Safety Meeting staring blankly at the only thing moving in the room besides the lips of the Safety Article Hypnotist, a black beetle scurrying across the floor, Andy Tubbs finally broke through our hypnotic state by making a suggestion. He said, “How about we start entering safety slogans for the Safety Slogan Contest and try to win the free pizza at the end of the year? Instead of just sitting here on Monday Mornings doing the same thing over and over, let’s spend our time brainstorming Safety Slogans!”

This of course was a brilliant idea. It meant that we would actually be blurting out all kinds of goofy safety slogans until we hit on a really good one to turn in for the month. We began immediately. I was the scribe capturing all the creativity that suddenly came popping up from no where. Andy was real quick to come up with some. Others took their time, but when they spoke they usually had a pretty clever safety slogan.

By the end of the first day we had about 10 new safety slogans to choose from. We picked the best one of the bunch and turned it in at the front office. I don’t remember the specific safety slogan we started out with, but I do remember some of them that the team invented. Here are a couple unique slogans that I have always remembered – not written by me….

“Lift with your legs, not with your back, or you may hear a Lumbar crack.”

“Wear skin protection in Oklahoma or you may get Melanoma.”

I invite anyone at the plant that remembers more slogans to add them to the Comments below….

You can see that we tried to take a standard safety slogan like “Lift with Your Legs and Not your Back” and added a clever twist to it. I had taken out the stack of safety pamphlets from the cabinet and we reviewed them. Each of them had a safety slogan on the back. We weren’t going to use any that were already written, but it gave us ideas for new slogans.

We won the Monthly Safety Slogan that month. So, we figured we were on a roll. The next month we picked our next best one. By that time we must have come up with over 25 pretty good safety slogans, and we figured we would enter our best one each month. We were in for a little surprise.

After submitting a real humdinger of a Safety Slogan the second month (something like, “Wear your Eye Protection at work so you can See Your Family at Home” — well. I just made that up. I don’t remember the exact slogan 22 years later), the slogan that won that month was a much more bland slogan than our clever one. We felt slighted. So, we talked to Jimmy Moore (I believe) who was the electrician on the other team of Electricians in our shop that was on the Safety Committee selecting the safety slogans this year. He said that there were some people on the committee that thought it wasn’t good for the same team to win two times in a row. Others thought that any one team should only be able to win once a year.

As it turned out, we were able to win the monthly safety slogan only a few more times that year only because we were the only team that turned in a safety slogan during those months.

When it came time for picking the winning safety slogan for the year, Sue Schritter’s slogan from the warehouse won even though it was fairly lame compared to the clever ones we had been turning in. (Note the warehouse and the front office were all under the same manager…. so, when one of them won, they both really did). So, the front office (slash) warehouse were able to enjoy the free pizza.

After complaining about the process at the beginning of the next year, we were determined that we were going to do what it took to win every single month and that way they would have to give us the pizza at the end of the year. So, in 1993 that was our goal.

It was determined at the beginning of the year that all safety slogans would be judged without knowing who had turned them in. It was also determined that a team could turn in as many safety slogans as they wanted each month (probably because we had complained that our team was unfairly being singled out).

So, we made a concerted effort to turn in at least 15 safety slogans each month. That way, the odds of one of ours being picked would be very high, especially since our team was the only team that was really serious about wanting to win the free pizza at the end of the year.

Gary Wehunt from our team was on the committee selecting the slogans in 1993, so he would tell us about the conversations the committee was having each month when they would get together to select the slogan, and we knew it wasn’t going to be easy to win every single month.

During the year, it became a game of cat and mouse to try to win the safety slogan of the month every single month. We knew that a couple of people on the Safety Committee were doing everything they could to not pick one our our slogans. So, here is what we did… along with the best safety slogans we had, we threw in some really lame ones. I think we had some that were so bad they were nothing more than…. “Think Safety”. Our better safety slogans were more like: “Watch for Overhead Hazards! Avoid becoming Food for Buzzards” or “Wear you Safety Harness when working up high. One wrong step and you may die.” — I mean…. How could any other safety slogan compete with the likes of those?

The funny thing was that we thought that just in case the Safety Committee was trying to look for a safety slogan that our team didn’t write, they would intentionally pick a really bad one. Like “Think Safety”.

Various Safety Signs you may see around a Power Plant

Various Safety Signs you may see around a Power Plant

And it actually worked. Two months during 1993, the team actually chose a Safety Slogan that was really lame, just to try and pick the one that our team didn’t enter only to be surprised to find that it was from our team.

Through October our team had managed to win every Safety Slogan of the Month, and it looked like we were going to finally win the Safety Slogan of the Year and receive the free Pizza. I had written down every safety slogan our team had invented. We had over 425 safety slogans by that time. I had a folder in the filing cabinet with the entire list.

Then in November, the people who were on the Safety Committee who were intent on us not winning the yearly safety slogan was able to slip one by. They had submitted a safety slogan from their own team and had told a couple other people to vote for it. It didn’t take too many votes to win for the month since when we turned in 15 to 20 slogans the votes were spread out.

Most of the slogans that did receive a vote would only get one vote. So, any slogan that had two or more votes would usually win. So, all they had to do was throw together a safety slogan and tell someone else on the committee that was not happy about our team winning every month during the year, and they would win that month.

Louise Kalicki turned in a safety slogan in November. It was a simple safety slogan like “Be Safe for your family’s sake”. We had turned in a number of slogans that had said pretty much the same thing in the 400 or more slogans we had submitted, but that was the slogan that won during that month.

Well. That was all it took. When the winner of the Safety Slogan for the year was chosen, there was no way that everyone didn’t already know whose team the safety slogan was from because they had been posted on the bulletin boards throughout the year. So, you can guess what happened. After the electric shop had won 11 of the 12 safety slogans in 1993, The girls in the front office won the free pizza… again (just like they did every year).

So, what happened in 1994? Well…. That’s another story… isn’t it?

Reddy KiloWatt never takes a vacation... Oh wait... That's not a Safety Slogan.

Reddy KiloWatt never takes a vacation… Oh wait… That’s not a Safety Slogan.

Comments from the original post:

    1. Ron Kilman June 7, 2014

      Art Linkletter had it right when he said “People are funny”.

    1. BattleBlue1 June 7, 2014

      Nice! I really enjoyed this post. I work at a power plant now and this could have happened yesterday. Some things don’t change!

  1. fred June 8, 2014

    I remember one slogan that I thought of but never could get the crew to submit it. It was,
    “When it comes to safety the old cliché “NO PAIN NO GAIN” is just a crock of s**t.” I think you could have may made your record 10/2 that year.
    I do remember your crew dominating the slogan compaign.

When Power Plant Competition Turns Terribly Safe

Originally posted June 6, 2014;

I’m sure the plant manager at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma thought that a little competition might just do our Safety Program a little good. The maintenance crews always knew what they were going to be doing first thing on Monday morning. They were going to attend a Safety Meeting with their team. All of the maintenance crews attended a team safety meeting every Monday morning to remind them to be safe during the week. This had been going on for at least 9 years at the power plant. Every Monday morning we all looked forward to the 30 minutes we would spend reminding ourselves to be safe that week.

It didn’t seem to matter if I was on the Summer Help yard crew, or a janitor, on the labor crew or an electrician. The Monday Morning safety meetings were all pretty much the same. Someone would read from a Safety pamphlet that each of the foreman would receive once each month. We would try to read one of the articles each week in order to stretch it out so that it lasted the entire month of Monday Morning Safety Meetings. This often meant that we would be listening to a completely irrelevant safety article that really didn’t apply to us.

Some of the articles were things that reminded us to be safe in the work place. Other articles reminded us to clean up the kitchen counter after you have finished cutting up the chicken in order to cook fried chicken for dinner. The chicken juices could lead to food poisoning if they sat there for a while and then some other food was placed on the same counter if it was still soaked in juices from the chicken. We justified to ourselves that it didn’t hurt to remind ourselves about things like this because if we went home and had food poisoning by not watching our chicken juices, then it could be as serious as a lost workday accident on the job.

When I joined the electric shop, I used to keep a stack of all the Safety Pamphlets. Who knew if they would ever come in handy. Years later when I left the Power Plant to pursue another career I left the stack behind in case some other safety zealot needed some motivating safety material. I tried to find a picture of the safety pamphlets that we used to read on Google, but I could only find Safety Pamphlets that were more colorful and had more eye-catching covers. The only aesthetic difference between our safety pamphlets from one month to the other consisted of using a different color font. So, one month, the pamphlet would be written in blue. The next month, green. Then red. Maybe purple some times. The December one would have a little drawing of holly at the top. That was about as exciting as they were.

Occasionally the foreman would get a different kind of safety pamphlet on a certain topic. Instead of changing the font color, this pamphlet would change the background color to one bright solid color. I could find a picture of one of these:

Wouldn't want to make the cover any more interesting.  It might take away from the message

Wouldn’t want to make the cover any more interesting. It might take away from the message

In the first paragraph I mentioned that the maintenance crews generally knew what they would be doing right off the bat on Monday morning when their work day began. Yep. They would spend 15 to 30 minutes staring off into space while their foreman, or the designated hypnotist would read a safety pamphlet in a monotone voice. I think it was permitted to fall asleep as long as you didn’t snore. Once you snored it was too hard to claim that your eyes were closed only so that you could better picture how to lift with your legs and not your back.

In order to add something dynamic to the Monday Morning Safety Meeting, it was decided that some friendly competition might help. So, here is what happened:

A Safety Committee was formed and their task was to collect safety slogans from the teams and once each month they would decide which slogan was the best and then it would become the “Safety Slogan of the Month”. Then for the next month this particular safety slogan would be posted on all the bulletin boards throughout the plant. At the end of the year, a winner was selected from the 12 winning Monthly Safety Slogans. Whichever team won the safety slogan of the year award would be honored with a free Pizza (or two) for lunch.

Power Plant Pepperoni Pizza

Power Plant Pepperoni Pizza

A noble attempt at trying to add a little spice (and tomato sauce) into the safety program.

At first our team didn’t give this much thought. I was one of the first people from the electric shop on the committee and since I was on the committee, I didn’t think it would be fair to submit a safety slogan myself, because I would have to be one of the people voting on it. One person from each area was on the Safety Committee. One person from each of the three A foremen’s teams in the Maintenance shop. One person from the Instrument and Controls team and one electrician. One person from the office area. One from the warehouse. There might have been one person from the Chemistry Lab, but since there were only three chemists, I’m not sure how long that lasted.

Anyway, sometime in March, 1992, when we were sitting in a Monday Morning Safety Meeting staring blankly at the only thing moving in the room besides the lips of the Safety Article Hypnotist, a black beetle scurrying across the floor, Andy Tubbs finally broke through our hypnotic state by making a suggestion. He said, “How about we start entering safety slogans for the Safety Slogan Contest and try to win the free pizza at the end of the year? Instead of just sitting here on Monday Mornings doing the same thing over and over, let’s spend our time brainstorming Safety Slogans!”

This of course was a brilliant idea. It meant that we would actually be blurting out all kinds of goofy safety slogans until we hit on a really good one to turn in for the month. We began immediately. I was the scribe capturing all the creativity that suddenly came popping up from no where. Andy was real quick to come up with some. Others took their time, but when they spoke they usually had a pretty clever safety slogan.

By the end of the first day we had about 10 new safety slogans to choose from. We picked the best one of the bunch and turned it in at the front office. I don’t remember the specific safety slogan we started out with, but I do remember some of them that the team invented. Here are a couple unique slogans that I have always remembered – not written by me….

“Lift with your legs, not with your back, or you may hear a Lumbar crack.”

“Wear skin protection in Oklahoma or you may get Melanoma.”

I invite anyone at the plant that remembers more slogans to add them to the Comments below….

You can see that we tried to take a standard safety slogan like “Lift with Your Legs and Not your Back” and added a clever twist to it. I had taken out the stack of safety pamphlets from the cabinet and we reviewed them. Each of them had a safety slogan on the back. We weren’t going to use any that were already written, but it gave us ideas for new slogans.

We won the Monthly Safety Slogan that month. So, we figured we were on a roll. The next month we picked our next best one. By that time we must have come up with over 25 pretty good safety slogans, and we figured we would enter our best one each month. We were in for a little surprise.

After submitting a real humdinger of a Safety Slogan the second month (something like, “Wear your Eye Protection at work so you can See Your Family at Home” — well. I just made that up. I don’t remember the exact slogan 22 years later), the slogan that won that month was a much more bland slogan than our clever one. We felt slighted. So, we talked to Jimmy Moore (I believe) who was the electrician on the other team of Electricians in our shop that was on the Safety Committee selecting the safety slogans this year. He said that there were some people on the committee that thought it wasn’t good for the same team to win two times in a row. Others thought that any one team should only be able to win once a year.

As it turned out, we were able to win the monthly safety slogan only a few more times that year only because we were the only team that turned in a safety slogan during those months.

When it came time for picking the winning safety slogan for the year, Sue Schritter’s slogan from the warehouse won even though it was fairly lame compared to the clever ones we had been turning in. (Note the warehouse and the front office were all under the same manager…. so, when one of them won, they both really did). So, the front office (slash) warehouse were able to enjoy the free pizza.

After complaining about the process at the beginning of the next year, we were determined that we were going to do what it took to win every single month and that way they would have to give us the pizza at the end of the year. So, in 1993 that was our goal.

It was determined at the beginning of the year that all safety slogans would be judged without knowing who had turned them in. It was also determined that a team could turn in as many safety slogans as they wanted each month (probably because we had complained that our team was unfairly being singled out).

So, we made a concerted effort to turn in at least 15 safety slogans each month. That way, the odds of one of ours being picked would be very high, especially since our team was the only team that was really serious about wanting to win the free pizza at the end of the year.

Gary Wehunt from our team was on the committee selecting the slogans in 1993, so he would tell us about the conversations the committee was having each month when they would get together to select the slogan, and we knew it wasn’t going to be easy to win every single month.

During the year, it became a game of cat and mouse to try to win the safety slogan of the month every single month. We knew that a couple of people on the Safety Committee were doing everything they could to not pick one our our slogans. So, here is what we did… along with the best safety slogans we had, we threw in some really lame ones. I think we had some that were so bad they were nothing more than…. “Think Safety”. Our better safety slogans were more like: “Watch for Overhead Hazards! Avoid becoming Food for Buzzards” or “Wear you Safety Harness when working up high. One wrong step and you may die.” — I mean…. How could any other safety slogan compete with the likes of those?

The funny thing was that we thought that just in case the Safety Committee was trying to look for a safety slogan that our team didn’t write, they would intentionally pick a really bad one. Like “Think Safety”.

Various Safety Signs you may see around a Power Plant

Various Safety Signs you may see around a Power Plant

And it actually worked. Two months during 1993, the team actually chose a Safety Slogan that was really lame, just to try and pick the one that our team didn’t enter only to be surprised to find that it was from our team.

Through October our team had managed to win every Safety Slogan of the Month, and it looked like we were going to finally win the Safety Slogan of the Year and receive the free Pizza. I had written down every safety slogan our team had invented. We had over 425 safety slogans by that time. I had a folder in the filing cabinet with the entire list.

Then in November, the people who were on the Safety Committee who were intent on us not winning the yearly safety slogan was able to slip one by. They had submitted a safety slogan from their own team and had told a couple other people to vote for it. It didn’t take too many votes to win for the month since when we turned in 15 to 20 slogans the votes were spread out.

Most of the slogans that did receive a vote would only get one vote. So, any slogan that had two or more votes would usually win. So, all they had to do was throw together a safety slogan and tell someone else on the committee that was not happy about our team winning every month during the year, and they would win that month.

Louise Kalicki turned in a safety slogan in November. It was a simple safety slogan like “Be Safe for your family’s sake”. We had turned in a number of slogans that had said pretty much the same thing in the 400 or more slogans we had submitted, but that was the slogan that won during that month.

Well. That was all it took. When the winner of the Safety Slogan for the year was chosen, there was no way that everyone didn’t already know whose team the safety slogan was from because they had been posted on the bulletin boards throughout the year. So, you can guess what happened. After the electric shop had won 11 of the 12 safety slogans in 1993, The girls in the front office won the free pizza… again (just like they did every year).

So, what happened in 1994? Well…. That’s another story… isn’t it?

Reddy KiloWatt never takes a vacation... Oh wait... That's not a Safety Slogan.

Reddy KiloWatt never takes a vacation… Oh wait… That’s not a Safety Slogan.

Comments from the original post:

    1. Ron Kilman June 7, 2014

      Art Linkletter had it right when he said “People are funny”.

    1. BattleBlue1 June 7, 2014

      Nice! I really enjoyed this post. I work at a power plant now and this could have happened yesterday. Some things don’t change!

  1. fred June 8, 2014

    I remember one slogan that I thought of but never could get the crew to submit it. It was,
    “When it comes to safety the old cliché “NO PAIN NO GAIN” is just a crock of s**t.” I think you could have may made your record 10/2 that year.
    I do remember your crew dominating the slogan compaign.

When Power Plant Competition Turns Terribly Safe

Originally posted June 6, 2014;

I’m sure the plant manager at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma thought that a little competition might just do our Safety Program a little good. The maintenance crews always knew what they were going to be doing first thing on Monday morning. They were going to attend a Safety Meeting with their team. All of the maintenance crews attended a team safety meeting every Monday morning to remind them to be safe during the week. This had been going on for at least 9 years at the power plant. Every Monday morning we all looked forward to the 30 minutes we would spend reminding ourselves to be safe that week.

It didn’t seem to matter if I was on the Summer Help yard crew, or a janitor, on the labor crew or an electrician. The Monday Morning safety meetings were all pretty much the same. Someone would read from a Safety pamphlet that each of the foreman would receive once each month. We would try to read one of the articles each week in order to stretch it out so that it lasted the entire month of Monday Morning Safety Meetings. This often meant that we would be listening to a completely irrelevant safety article that really didn’t apply to us.

Some of the articles were things that reminded us to be safe in the work place. Other articles reminded us to clean up the kitchen counter after you have finished cutting up the chicken in order to cook fried chicken for dinner. The chicken juices could lead to food poisoning if they sat there for a while and then some other food was placed on the same counter if it was still soaked in juices from the chicken. We justified to ourselves that it didn’t hurt to remind ourselves about things like this because if we went home and had food poisoning by not watching our chicken juices, then it could be as serious as a lost workday accident on the job.

When I joined the electric shop, I used to keep a stack of all the Safety Pamphlets. Who knew if they would ever come in handy. Years later when I left the Power Plant to pursue another career I left the stack behind in case some other safety zealot needed some motivating safety material. I tried to find a picture of the safety pamphlets that we used to read on Google, but I could only find Safety Pamphlets that were more colorful and had more eye-catching covers. The only aesthetic difference between our safety pamphlets from one month to the other consisted of using a different color font. So, one month, the pamphlet would be written in blue. The next month, green. Then red. Maybe purple some times. The December one would have a little drawing of holly at the top. That was about as exciting as they were.

Occasionally the foreman would get a different kind of safety pamphlet on a certain topic. Instead of changing the font color, this pamphlet would change the background color to one bright solid color. I could find a picture of one of these:

Wouldn't want to make the cover any more interesting.  It might take away from the message

Wouldn’t want to make the cover any more interesting. It might take away from the message

In the first paragraph I mentioned that the maintenance crews generally knew what they would be doing right off the bat on Monday morning when their work day began. Yep. They would spend 15 to 30 minutes staring off into space while their foreman, or the designated hypnotist would read a safety pamphlet in a monotone voice. I think it was permitted to fall asleep as long as you didn’t snore. Once you snored it was too hard to claim that your eyes were closed only so that you could better picture how to lift with your legs and not your back.

In order to add some dynamic to the Monday Morning Safety Meeting, it was decided that some friendly competition might help. So, here is what happened:

A Safety Committee was formed and their task was to collect safety slogans from the teams and once each month they would decide which slogan was the best and then it would become the “Safety Slogan of the Month”. Then for the next month this particular safety slogan would be posted on all the bulletin boards throughout the plant. At the end of the year, a winner was selected from the 12 winning Monthly Safety Slogans. Whichever team won the safety slogan of the year award would be honored with a free Pizza (or two) for lunch.

Power Plant Pepperoni Pizza

Power Plant Pepperoni Pizza

A noble attempt at trying to add a little spice into the safety program.

At first our team didn’t give this much thought. I was one of the first people from the electric shop on the committee and since I was on the committee, I didn’t think it would be fair to submit a safety slogan myself, because I would have to be one of the people voting on it. One person from each area was on the Safety Committee. One person from each of the three A foremen’s teams in the Maintenance shop. One person from the Instrument and Controls team and one electrician. One person from the office area. One from the warehouse. There might have been one person from the Chemistry Lab, but since there were only three chemists, I’m not sure how long that lasted.

Anyway, sometime in March, 1992, when we were sitting in a Monday Morning Safety Meeting staring blankly at the only thing moving in the room besides the lips of the Safety Article Hypnotist, a black beetle scurrying across the floor, Andy Tubbs finally broke through our hypnotic state by making a suggestion. He said, “How about we start entering safety slogans for the Safety Slogan Contest and try to win the free pizza at the end of the year? Instead of just sitting here on Monday Mornings doing the same thing over and over, let’s spend our time brainstorming Safety Slogans!”

This of course was a brilliant idea. It meant that we would actually be blurting out all kinds of goofy safety slogans until we hit on a really good one to turn in for the month. We began immediately. I was the scribe capturing all the creativity that suddenly came popping up from no where. Andy was real quick to come up with some. Others took their time, but when they spoke they usually had a pretty clever safety slogan.

By the end of the first day we had about 10 new safety slogans to choose from. We picked the best one of the bunch and turned it in at the front office. I don’t remember the specific safety slogan we started out with, but I do remember some of them that the team invented. Here are a couple unique slogans that I have always remembered – not written by me….

“Lift with your legs, not with your back, or you may hear a Lumbar crack.”

“Wear skin protection in Oklahoma or you may get Melanoma.”

I invite anyone at the plant that remembers more slogans to add them to the Comments below….

You can see that we tried to take a standard safety slogan like “Lift with Your Legs and Not your Back” and added a clever twist to it. I had taken out the stack of safety pamphlets from the cabinet and we reviewed them. Each of them had a safety slogan on the back. We weren’t going to use any that were already written, but it gave us ideas for new slogans.

We won the Monthly Safety Slogan that month. So, we figured we were on a roll. The next month we picked our next best one. By that time we must have come up with over 25 pretty good safety slogans, and we figured we would enter our best one each month. We were in for a little surprise.

After submitting a real humdinger of a Safety Slogan the second month (something like, “Where your Eye Protection at work so you can See Your Family at Home” — well. I just made that up. I don’t remember the exact slogan 22 years later), the slogan that won that month was a much more bland slogan than our clever one. We felt slighted. So, we talked to Jimmy Moore (I believe) who was the electrician on the other team of Electricians in our shop that was on the Safety Committee selecting the safety slogans this year. He said that there were some people on the committee that thought it wasn’t good for the same team to win two times in a row. Others thought that any one team should only be able to win once a year.

As it turned out, we were able to win the monthly safety slogan only a few more times that year only because we were the only team that turned in a safety slogan during those months.

When it came time for picking the winning safety slogan for the year, Sue Schritter’s slogan from the warehouse won even though it was fairly lame compared to the clever ones we had been turning in. (Note the warehouse and the front office were all under the same manager…. so, when one of them won, they both really did). So, the front office (slash) warehouse were able to enjoy the free pizza.

After complaining about the process at the beginning of the next year, we were determined that we were going to do what it took to win every single month and that way they would have to give us the pizza at the end of the year. So, in 1993 that was our goal.

It was determined at the beginning of the year that all safety slogans would be judged without knowing who had turned them in. It was also determined that a team could turn in as many safety slogans as they wanted each month (probably because we had complained that our team was unfairly being singled out). So, we made a concerted effort to turn in at least 15 safety slogans each month. That way, the odds of one of ours being picked would be very high, especially since our team was the only team that was really serious about wanting to win the free pizza at the end of the year. Gary Wehunt from our team was on the committee selecting the slogans in 1993, so he would tell us about the conversations the committee was having each month when they would get together to select the slogan, and we knew it wasn’t going to be easy to win every single month.

During the year, it became a game of cat and mouse to try to win the safety slogan of the month every single month. We knew that a couple of people on the Safety Committee were doing everything they could to not pick one our our slogans. So, here is what we did… along with the best safety slogans we had, we threw in some really lame ones. I think we had some that were so bad they were nothing more than…. “Think Safety”. Our better safety slogans were more like: “Watch for Overhead Hazards! Avoid becoming Food for Buzzards” or “Wear you Safety Harness when working up high. One wrong step and you may die.” — I mean…. How could any other safety slogan compete with the likes of those?

The funny thing was that we thought that just in case the Safety Committee was trying to look for a safety slogan that our team didn’t write, they would intentionally pick a really bad one. Like “Think Safety”.

Various Safety Signs you may see around a Power Plant

Various Safety Signs you may see around a Power Plant

And it actually worked. Two months during 1993, the team actually chose a Safety Slogan that was really lame, just to try and pick the one that our team didn’t enter only to be surprised to find that it was from our team.

Through October our team had managed to win ever Safety Slogan of the Month, and it looked like we were going to finally win the Safety Slogan of the Year and receive the free Pizza. I had written down every safety slogan our team had invented. We had over 425 safety slogans by that time. I had a folder in the filing cabinet with the entire list.

Then in November, the people who were on the Safety Committee who were intent on us not winning the yearly safety slogan was able to slip one by. They had submitted a safety slogan from their own team and had told a couple other people to vote for it. It didn’t take too many votes to win for the month since when we turned in 15 to 20 slogans the votes were spread out. Most of the slogans that did receive a vote would only get one vote. So, any slogan that had two or more votes would usually win. So, all they had to do was throw together a safety slogan and tell someone else on the committee that was not happy about our team winning every month during the year, and they would win that month.

Louise Kalicki turned in a safety slogan in November. It was a simple safety slogan like “Be Safe for your family’s sake”. We had turned in a number of slogans that had said pretty much the same thing in the 400 or more slogans we had submitted, but that was the slogan that won during that month.

Well. That was all it took. When the winner of the Safety Slogan for the year was chosen, there was no way that everyone didn’t already know whose team the safety slogan was from because they had been posted on the bulletin boards throughout the year. So, you can guess what happened. After the electric shop had won 11 of the 12 safety slogans in 1993, The girls in the front office won the free pizza… again.

So, what happened in 1994? Well…. That’s another story… isn’t it?

Reddy KiloWatt never takes a vacation... Oh wait... That's not a Safety Slogan.

Reddy KiloWatt never takes a vacation… Oh wait… That’s not a Safety Slogan.

Comments from the original post:

    1. Ron Kilman June 7, 2014

      Art Linkletter had it right when he said “People are funny”.

    1. BattleBlue1 June 7, 2014

      Nice! I really enjoyed this post. I work at a power plant now and this could have happened yesterday. Some things don’t change!

  1. fred June 8, 2014

    I remember one slogan that I thought of but never could get the crew to submit it. It was,
    “When it comes to safety the old cliché “NO PAIN NO GAIN” is just a crock of s**t.” I think you could have may made your record 10/2 that year.
    I do remember your crew dominating the slogan compaign.

When Power Plant Competition Turns Terribly Safe

I’m sure the plant manager at the Coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma thought that a little competition might just do our Safety Program a little good.  The maintenance crews always knew what they were going to be doing first thing on Monday morning.  They were going to attend a Safety Meeting with their team.  All of the maintenance crews attended a team safety meeting every Monday morning to remind them to be safe during the week.  This had been going on for at least 9 years at the power plant.  Every Monday morning we all looked forward to the 30 minutes we would spend reminding ourselves to be safe that week.

It didn’t seem to matter if I was on the Summer Help yard crew, or a janitor, on the labor crew or an electrician.  The Monday Morning safety meetings were all pretty much the same.  Someone would read from a Safety pamphlet that each of the foreman would receive once each month.  We would try to read one of the articles each week in order to stretch it out so that it lasted the entire month of Monday Morning Safety Meetings.  This often meant that we would be listening to a completely irrelevant safety article that really didn’t apply to us.

Some of the articles were things that reminded us to be safe in the work place.  Other articles reminded us to clean up the kitchen counter after you have finished cutting up the chicken in order to cook fried chicken for dinner.  The chicken juices could lead to food poisoning if they sat there for a while and then some other food was placed on the same counter if it was still soaked in juices from the chicken.  We justified to ourselves that it didn’t hurt to remind ourselves about things like this because if we went home and had food poisoning by not watching our chicken juices, then it could be as serious as a lost workday accident on the job.

When I joined the electric shop, I used to keep a stack of all the Safety Pamphlets.  Who knew if they would ever come in handy.  Years later when I left the Power Plant to pursue another career I left the stack behind in case some other safety zealot needed some motivating safety material.  I tried to find a picture of the safety pamphlets that we used to read on Google, but I could only find Safety Pamphlets that were more colorful and had more eye-catching covers.  The only aesthetic difference between our safety pamphlets from one month to the other consisted of using a different color font.  So, one month, the pamphlet would be written in blue.  The next month, green.  Then red.  Maybe purple some times.  The December one would have a little drawing of holly at the top.  That was about as exciting as they were.

Occasionally the foreman would get a different kind of safety pamphlet on a certain topic.  Instead of changing the font color, this pamphlet would change the background color to one bright solid color.  I could find a picture of one of these:

Wouldn't want to make the cover any more interesting.  It might take away from the message

Wouldn’t want to make the cover any more interesting. It might take away from the message

In the first paragraph I mentioned that the maintenance crews generally knew what they would be doing right off the bat on Monday morning when their work day began.  Yep.  They would spend 15 to 30 minutes staring off into space while their foreman, or the designated hypnotist would read a safety pamphlet in a monotone voice.  I think it was permitted to fall asleep as long as you didn’t snore.  Once you snored it was too hard to claim that your eyes were closed only so that you could better picture how to lift with your legs and not your back.

In order to add some dynamic to the Monday Morning Safety Meeting, it was decided that some friendly competition might help.  So, here is what happened:

A Safety Committee was formed and their task was to collect safety slogans from the teams and once each month they would decide which slogan was the best and then it would become the “Safety Slogan of the Month”.  Then for the next month this particular safety slogan would be posted on all the bulletin boards throughout the plant.  At the end of the year, a winner was selected from the 12 winning Monthly Safety Slogans.  Whichever team won the safety slogan of the year award would be honored with a free Pizza (or two) for lunch.

Power Plant Pepperoni Pizza

Power Plant Pepperoni Pizza

A noble attempt at trying to add a little spice into the safety program.

At first our team didn’t give this much thought.  I was one of the first people from the electric shop on the committee and since I was on the committee, I didn’t think it would be fair to submit a safety slogan myself, because I would have to be one of the people voting on it.  One person from each area was on the Safety Committee.  One person from each of the three A foremen’s teams in the Maintenance shop.  One person from the Instrument and Controls team and one electrician.  One person from the office area.   One from the warehouse.  There might have been one person from the Chemistry Lab, but since there were only three chemists, I’m not sure how long that lasted.

Anyway, sometime in March, 1992, when we were sitting in a Monday Morning Safety Meeting staring blankly at the only thing moving in the room besides the lips of the Safety Article Hypnotist, a black beetle scurrying across the floor, Andy Tubbs finally broke through our hypnotic state by making a suggestion.  He said, “How about we start entering safety slogans for the Safety Slogan Contest and try to win the free pizza at the end of the year?  Instead of just sitting here on Monday Mornings doing the same thing over and over, let’s spend our time brainstorming Safety Slogans!”

This of course was a brilliant idea.  It meant that we would actually be blurting out all kinds of goofy safety slogans until we hit on a really good one to turn in for the month.  We began immediately.  I was the scribe capturing all the creativity that suddenly came popping up from no where.  Andy was real quick to come up with some.  Others took their time, but when they spoke they usually had a pretty clever safety slogan.

By the end of the first day we had about 10 new safety slogans to choose from.  We picked the best one of the bunch and turned it in at the front office.  I don’t remember the specific safety slogan we started out with, but I do remember some of them that the team invented.  Here are a couple unique slogans that I have always remembered – not written by me….

“Lift with your legs, not with your back, or you  may hear a Lumbar crack.”

“Wear skin protection in Oklahoma or you may get Melanoma.”

I invite anyone at the plant that remembers more slogans to  add them to the Comments below….

You can see that we tried to take a standard safety slogan like “Lift with Your Legs and Not your Back” and added a clever twist to it.  I had taken out the stack of safety pamphlets from the cabinet and we reviewed them.  Each of them had a safety slogan on the back.  We weren’t going to use any that were already written, but it gave us ideas for new slogans.

We won the Monthly Safety Slogan that month.  So, we figured we were on a roll.  The next month we picked our next best one.  By that time we must have come up with over 25 pretty good safety slogans, and we figured we would enter our best one each month.  We were in for a little surprise.

After submitting a real humdinger of a Safety Slogan the second month (something like, “Where your Eye Protection at work so you can See Your Family at Home”  — well.  I just made that up.  I don’t remember the exact slogan 22 years later), the slogan that won that month was a much more bland slogan than our clever one.  We felt slighted.  So, we talked to Jimmy Moore (I believe) who was the electrician on the other team of Electricians in our shop that was on the Safety Committee selecting the safety slogans this year.  He said that there were some people on the committee that thought it wasn’t good for the same team to win two times in a row.  Others thought that any one team should only be able to win once a year.

As it turned out, we were able to win the monthly safety slogan only a few more times that year only because we were the only team that turned in a safety slogan during those months.

When it came time for picking the winning safety slogan for the year, Sue Schritter’s slogan from the warehouse won even though it was fairly lame compared to the clever ones we had been turning in. (Note the warehouse and the front office were all under the same manager…. so, when one of them won, they both really did).  So, the front office (slash) warehouse were able to enjoy the free pizza.

After complaining about the process at the beginning of the next year, we were determined that we were going to do what it took to win every single month and that way they would have to give us the pizza at the end of the year.  So, in 1993 that was our goal.

It was determined at the beginning of the year that all safety slogans would be judged without knowing who had turned them in.  It was also determined that a team could turn in as many safety slogans as they wanted each month (probably because we had complained that our team was unfairly being singled out).  So, we made a concerted effort to turn in at least 15 safety slogans each month.  That way, the odds of one of ours being picked would be very high, especially since our team was the only team that was really serious about wanting to win the free pizza at the end of the year.  Gary Wehunt from our team was on the committee selecting the slogans in 1993, so he would tell us about the conversations the committee was having each month when they would get together to select the slogan, and we knew it wasn’t going to be easy to win every single month.

During the year, it became a game of cat and mouse to try to win the safety slogan of the month every single month.  We knew that a couple of people on the Safety Committee were doing everything they could to not pick one our our slogans.  So, here is what we did…  along with the best safety slogans we had, we threw in some really lame ones.  I think we had some that were so bad they were nothing more than…. “Think Safety”.  Our better safety slogans were more like:  “Watch for Overhead Hazards!  Avoid becoming Food for Buzzards”  or “Wear you Safety Harness when working up high.  One wrong step and you may die.”  — I mean…. How could any other safety slogan compete with the likes of those?

The funny thing was that we thought that just in case the Safety Committee was trying to look for a safety slogan that our team didn’t write, they would intentionally pick a really bad one.  Like “Think Safety”.

Various Safety Signs you may see around a Power Plant

Various Safety Signs you may see around a Power Plant

And it actually worked.  Two months during 1993, the team actually chose a Safety Slogan that was really lame, just to try and pick the one that our team didn’t enter only to be surprised to find that it was from our team.

Through October our team had managed to win ever  Safety Slogan of the Month, and it looked like we were going to finally win the Safety Slogan of the Year and receive the free Pizza.  I had written down every safety slogan our team had invented.  We had over 425 safety slogans by that time.  I had a folder in the filing cabinet with the entire list.

Then in November, the people who were on the Safety Committee who were intent on us not winning the yearly safety slogan was able to slip one by.  They had submitted a safety slogan from their own team and had told a couple other people to vote for it.  It didn’t take too many votes to win for the month since when we turned in 15 to 20 slogans the votes were spread out.  Most of the slogans that did receive a vote would only get one vote.  So, any slogan that had two or more votes would usually win.  So, all they had to do was throw together a safety slogan and tell someone else on the committee that was not happy about our team winning every month during the year, and they would win that month.

Louise Kalicki turned in a safety slogan in November.  It was a simple safety slogan like “Be Safe for your family’s sake”.  We had turned in a number of slogans that had said pretty much the same thing in the 400 or more slogans we had submitted, but that was the slogan that won during that month.

Well.  That was all it took.  When the winner of the Safety Slogan for the year was chosen, there was no way that everyone didn’t already know whose team the safety slogan was from because they had been posted on the bulletin boards throughout the year.  So, you can guess what happened.  After the electric shop had won 11 of the 12 safety slogans in 1993, The girls in the front office won the free pizza… again.

So, what happened in 1994?  Well…. That’s another story… isn’t it?

Reddy KiloWatt never takes a vacation... Oh wait... That's not a Safety Slogan.

Reddy KiloWatt never takes a vacation… Oh wait… That’s not a Safety Slogan.