You are a 4th year apprentice working in a school.
Having earlier in the day fallen through a classroom ceiling it is time for you to enter the loft again.
Do you
a) Get up there and this time take a little more care where you are standing?
b) Refuse to go up because might fall through the ceiling again?
or
c) Get up there, take no extra care at all and fall through a different classroom ceiling?
I am afraid there is no prize.
It's (c) - and I bet he was on his phone!
I can top that though...
We had a 4th year middle school kid fall through our ceiling (I was in the 3rd year IIRC) - this so this is Y5-6 in modern parlance.
Surrey County Council had sent the insulation installers to put blown fibre[1] in the roof spaces of our main building (4th year block was flat roofed and the 2 portacabins don't have a lot of options either)
All we were warned was not to touch the big pipe as it had a charge on it (not sure if that was from static from blowing the fibres or if it was deliberate to make them stick rather than filling the air.
Bearing in mind this is a normal school day... And our classrooms must have had getting on for 3m high ceilings.
So on the upper floor where we were, there's this ladder into the loft space, with a 4" flexi pipe coming in through the window, snaking over the floor and corridor and up into the roof.
From time to time the workers would bugger off leaving it like that.
Our teacher said he had to go off to do something and to get on with work.
Few minutes after he's gone, there's a massive crash as the arse of some kid (the 4th year I guess as he was bigger than us) landed on the big ledge in front of the blackboard and bounced off onto the floor with the rest of him, having just fallen through a ceiling tile.
Luckily for him, he missed the pile of drawing pins that are usually lying around on the ledge.
Some girl asked if he was alright and he said yes, as he limped off - he'd obviously got curious and gone up the latter to have a look.
Teacher comes back - looks are mess and ceiling and we tell him what happened.
Did he:
1) Say "Oh god, we have to find him and make sure he goes to hospital for a checkup";2) Bollock the workers for leaving an unguarded ladder;
3) Say: "Well, he shouldn't have been up there!" and carry on like nothing had happened?Bonus point for guessing the total number of modern day safety violations...
[1] This was the 70s, so f*ck knows if the "fibres" has asbestos in for extra fun...
I hope your insurance covers the damage
well I would be (b)
tim
If (c) then recommend a career change to politics where consistency is prized above being right.
(d) This time fall with one leg either side of the joist and introduce the local population to a language lesson in a very high and squeaky voice.
Cheers
Dave R
I think the answer is
d) Get your mum to phone the manager and ask why you sent little Tarquin-Keanu up there in the first place
Owain
Well the sensible thing to do is call for a health and safety review of the job first and maybe somebody to make it safe? Of cores the fools rush in principal will dictate that the person is now sure where the supports are so will carefully make sure they tread the same distance apart each time and then discover that the supports are not the same everywhere and end up in hospital with a broken ankle. Brian
Well, actually something similar happened in the 1960s at my school, and the boy was sent to hospital on a buss, the mess was cleaned and life went on. Brian
I think all people need to have a personal copy of Right said Fred by Bernard Cribbens as part of their induction course when working in unfamiliar surroundings. Brian
buss b?s/ North Americanarchaicinformal noun noun: buss; plural noun: busses
verb: buss; 3rd person present: busses; past tense: bussed; past participle: bussed; gerund or present participle: bussing
Was the boy dispatched with a Glaswegian kiss ?.
Beautiful! Reminds me of an incident in the '60s
My father-in-law ran a small general building firm and employed my brother-in-law (his son) and an apprentice. They were working in Hullbridge, a little village in Essex, far away from everywhere else and on the banks of the River Crouch.
A customer had bought a pair of semi-detached bungalows and had commissioned the firm to convert them into one. They had re-roofed it with tiles on a tar paper base and removed the party wall between the two lofts. The intention was to close up one of the two access hatches and make good the ceiling underneath and alter the plumbing so that there was just one main water inlet, one header tank and one complete water system for the whole property. They were going to rewire it, knock doors through and alter the room layouts too.
FiL had left his son and the apprentice to work on the plumbing in the roof while he went to see to another job. My BiL had gone to get some materials and left the apprentice using a blow lamp to solder pipes close to the eaves of the roof when a careless gesture with the flame set light to some scraps of tar paper discarded between the ceiling joists. The flames leapt up and in a moment had set light to the rest of the tar paper under the tiles.
I'd better ring the Fire Brigade, thought the apprentice and climbed hurriedly out of the loft through the access hatch.
Unfortunately, in his panic he had chosen the wrong hatch. The ladder leaned against the opening of the other hatch and he just fell though the open hole in this one. Unharmed, he picked himself up and looked for the phone.
Unfortunately, the house phone was in the other half of the building, the front door to which was locked and the apprentice didn't have a key.
What he should have done was look at the telephone poles and work out which of the nearest houses was occupied and had a phone. What he actually did was run along the street to the phone box in the village centre and call the Fire Brigade from there.
By the time the fire brigade eventually arrived (from nearby Wickford or Hockley, I suppose) the fire had taken the entire property and all the brigade could do was contain the blaze and stop it spreading any further.
My BiL arrived back in Hullbridge and seeing the plume of smoke and the fire engines, wondered what had been going on. He soon discovered. I suppose I'd better call the Gaffer, he said to the apprentice and headed for the public phone box.
He was not looking forward to the call. He and his dad had a pretty gruff sort of working relationship and he knew he ought never to have left the apprentice to work alone and he could only imagine the dressing down he was going to get.
His dad listened in silence on the other end of the phone as he explained about the plumbing work, about leaving the apprentice, about the flames, the phone, the Fire Brigade, the empty, charred shell which was all that remained of the property and he waited for the inevitable explosion of rage on the other end of the line.
Silence.
Dad?
More silence?
Dad, are you there?
Eventually a quiet, calm voice answered.
Are you and the lad alright? Anybody hurt?
No, Dad. Nobody's hurt. We're all okay.
That's good, son. The other stuff... well...
That's what we pay our insurance for, isn't it?
Nick
It would not be worth getting them in for a such a small job - we are doing the electrics for an extension at the school so we might as well get the builders to fix it whilst they are on site.
We can then hide the cost of repairs under our extras:-)
What H&S review?
He has worked in loads of lofts before and never fallen through one before. I have only ever fallen through two (and one of those was at home).
If you want H&S gone mad I once crawled across a suspended grid ceiling using a few planks of wood to grab a fire alarm cable. I'll never ask an apprentice to do a job I am not prepared to do.
Answer is 3.
Modern day H&S violations?
The lad was not wearing a hi viz vest AICMFP.
I could probably find at least another 30 regs that are now broken.
Let's start with the fact that your teacher had just nipped into the staff room for a cigarette.
Our woodwork teacher couldn't be bothered to walk that far, he had a crafty smoke in his woodstore mid-lesson.
How did you guess :-o
Hehe...
It's possible. Some of use "caught" him and a few others down the Victoria pub at lunchtime (for some reason we were allowed out on an errand in town or something). Those must have been the days: horrible little oiks, but at least you could chuck a couple of swift ones back at lunchtime to soften the pain...
I still can :) But I don't teach...
In the same period as my story, our head just smoked in his office. It was like a 1950s smog when I had to go in (he was still smoking, the ashtray looked like Mt Bastard Versuvius). And I came from a 40-60 a day household...
We've come to expect these odd spellings from Brian's speech 2 text application. It's nothing to get worked up about. We know what he means (mostly). :-)
My New Year Resolutions :-
2) Stop making lists 7) learn to count d) be more consistentHomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.