What are the most unsafe work practices you have witnessed?

1. I work as a dental nurse and the dentist in my practice takes his gloves off so they turn inside out. He then puts his hands in the used side to turn them back when he reuses them.
   — Grayboff


2. A guy I used to work with at a fruit and veg store liked to throw the machetes for one spin and catch them. The same guy also liked to do cocaine before work. The same guy had to find a new job when he lost his finger in a cauliflower pallet. Place was a fucking crackhouse with lettuce. Minimum wage work is grim.
   — ennuinerdog


3. I work in a warehouse and we used to have a maintenance man that was pretty crazy. There are a couple of stories that come to mind, but my favorite has to be the time he was trying to take apart this very old press brake that's around 12 feet tall so we could scrap/sell it off. At one point there was a motor that wouldn't come off that was located near the top of the machine. After about an hour or 2 of trying to pry the "sumbitch" off with whatever method he could think of, he decided that he needed to ram it... with a forklift. Usually I'm not in the area that he is supposed to be working, but there is no way in hell i was going to miss this golden opportunity to witness something truly magnificent as someone jousting a machine. He took off on the forklift like only a true Knight of Camelot would and smashed forks first right into the machine! Unfortunately for the story nothing really exciting happened, he just rammed it and there was a lot of bouncing on his end. Not the first or last time I watched that man work and asked myself "am I going to watch Larry die today?".
   — abeasty






4. Worked in a school in a special needs program - This was a middle school aged program but most of the kids weren't toilet trained. We'd have accidents in the room almost daily and staff pretty much got into the routine of cleaning it up on our own if it was just pee - We figured "eh, can't call the janitors down here 4 times a day". That alone I'm pretty sure is an OSHA violation as none of us are properly trained. . .As of last year though janitors were getting pissed off that they were being called down to clean up literal "shit storms", sorry nothing I can do if a kid comes into school already with a full fucking pullup of shit and he goes apeshit when he comes into school because it's probably uncomfortable as hell. So our supervisor went in to "handle" this with the school janitors and came back with a very lovely solution "Ok so from now on we're just cleaning this all up by ourselves." . . .Yea, no - I'm not, sorry. . not my job, you already pay well below the average for aides in the states and we're in a rich district. . .We don't even have the supplies to handle this safely in our room, we usually use baby wipes. I will absolutely not be handling this completely untrained. So I left that school for the same position in a neighboring school district where everything is by the books, I actually get health insurance and about a 50% pay bump to be 5 steps lower. . .last I heard this shit keeps getting worse.
   — egnards


5. There was a flood in the basement of our bar where the beer was kept. I was sent in with a shop vac and a frayed extension cord to suck up the beer fridge flood water, one vacuum load at a time (with frayed extension cord balanced perilously above the water on beer cases), and then told to dump the water down a massive hole in another part of the basement that lead into the foundation.
   — tokenmetalhead


6. Employees would plug in electric space heaters (brought in from home) because management kept the heat set too low (52 degrees). Trouble is, the building had outdated electric service and wiring. Workers would smell insulation starting to get hot just before circuit breakers would trip or a screw-in fuse would blow.
   — Back2Bach






7. As a new nurse I was hired at a small heme onc (blood disorders and cancer medicine) clinic. There were multiple things they did wrong but a few stuck out: - I saw the nurse who was training me uncap an IV needle WITH HER TEETH. - None of the practices I had learned in school (gowns and double gloves for especially toxic chemo drugs) were put into place. The two employees who had been there the longest had both been diagnosed with cancer. I quit pretty quickly.
   — dreamsinred


8. I heard this story of a refinery expansion. They required a very large crane, and there are only a few of these in the US. The crane operator had a huge beard and demanded the ability to smoke while he ran the crane. The refinery had a no beard policy, and you can't smoke in one so they demanded a new crane operator, but he was the only one available for like 4 months. They ended up sitting up a special exemption area for this guy but if there were any gas leaks or releases beard man was fucked!
   — ooo-ooo-oooyea


9. I was on a photo assignment at a cedar shake mill in northern Vancouver Island in BC. That's a place where they make cedar shakes for roofing. There I saw some of the craziest workplace dangers I've ever seen. First was the "bucking floor" where the logs are cut to length. This is done with several guys standing on a slick stainless steel floor with large chains running across it that pull huge logs into the corner where, after an "all clear" signal is given, a (I shit you not) 6 foot diameter spinning saw blade with teeth an inch long swings all the way across the floor cutting through everything in its path. It goes through a 3 foot diameter long in about 1.5 seconds. It's surely terrifying! But that was nothing compared to the last job I photographed in that mill! There was a kid who's job it was to make sure that the chipper didn't get jammed. You see there is what they call a "shake table" which is like a conveyor belt of sorts but it operates by shaking violently in such a way that material is moved along due to the vibration. It feeds pieces of cedar that were unfit for use in the roofing materials into a big slick metal chute that leads directly to the absolutely MASSIVE chipper/shredder. So this guys job is to make sure that nothing gets stuck in the mouth of the chute. Ok right. So I'm photographing this kid as he is standing ON THE SHAKE TABLE. WITH NO SAFETY HARNESS. LITERALLY ABOVE THE CHUTE THAT GOES STRAIGHT TO THE CHIPPER. That chipper turns a log two feet long and two feet wide into cedar mulch in less than a half second. He would slip and slide around up there while holding a pike pole to push logs down into the chute. At times he would get out over the chute itself and kick them down with his feet! I never saw anything that insane at any other job site ever. I photographed these things at the beginning of my career almost twenty four years ago. I'm still shaking remembering it today.
   — _Piratical_






10. I'm gonna cheat here, because I only saw the aftermath. A friend in high school worked at Wendy's, and she was doing cleaning. There was a vent that needed cleaning, so she climbed onto the counter. This counter happened to be the one right next to the deep fryer. Her foot slips, and she is mid-calf deep into the deep fryer that was still on. She had her foot wrapped up for a long while after that, but showed me her foot. Yeah, don't make people stand on top of counters to clean anything, ever, there's a lot that can go wrong.
    — mkhpsyco


11. I worked at one company for about 10 years. From the time I was hired until about 8 years in, the company was involved in a lawsuit. Some guy had removed some machine safeties and got one of his hands cut off. You would think that the company would have learned but... I was tasked to write control software for a saw system. The software controlled all aspects of the saw. One of the things we programmed in was the ability to connect remotely to the system to see some diagnostics values. Nothing harmful in that right? Well, the upper level management insisted that I program in the ability to connect to the saw system and *take over running the saw regardless* of what the operator was doing at the time. I pointed out the someone in a sealed room would be able to do whatever they wanted and the machine operator would be in a dangerous situation, and if I was the operator, I would find a way to figure out who did it and kick their ass for them. Management decided that it would be perfectly safe to start running a saw system with out being able to actually see the machine or communicate with the machine operator. I refused. Probably contributed to getting laid off but would do it again.
    — BannedForTypingTruth