Woody the Safety Bloke Shares why he share his story to 1000’s of people every year.
Good day everyone, its Woody here, hey one of the things that people ask me when I go out to a work place to share my story is why do I do these talks, you know, why do I sit in front of a group of people and talk about how my accident happened, talk about how it affected me, affected all of the people around me at the time and the answer that I normally give is, well I can’t do what I used to do, I mean I can’t fix trucks and machinery on mine sites and construction sites which is what I used to be able to do, so I’ve got to somehow support myself, I mean I can’t sit in an office.
I reckon I’d go crazy if I sat in an office all day, that’s just the type of person that I am so I have to be you know, out there, visiting different environments and just you know feeling like I’m somehow contributing but you know the other reason that I do these talks is that this is the sort of thing that I would have actually listened to, I was a sort of person who you write something on a whiteboard or show me a PowerPoint and it just goes straight in my eyes and straight out my ears, well you know what I’m trying to say.
I don’t learn by, you know, actually reading stuff off boards or seeing slides. I learn more by seeing what people do, you know, other people’s actions and also by listening to other people’s stories so that’s the reason that I share my little message at workplaces.
Just a quick story to maybe give you a bit of an understanding of how this sort of thing works, when I first started doing these talks I went out to a mine site over in WA, anyhow I was there for three or four days and you know just telling people what happened to me, left the site and didn’t think too much about it, was pretty good site visit, anyhow about six months later had a phone call from the safety manager and he said to me, he said James look, what’s your fax number and I said, why, he said, shut up just give me your fax number, anyhow a couple of minutes later I got this incident report through on my fax machine.
I’m reading through it and a truck, a small truck had actually reversed over the dump and fell 25 meters down the side of this hill and ended up upside down so it was completely upside down. now the only injury that the operator received was she actually undid her seat belt and fell to the roof now there was an air-conditioning unit mounted in the roof of this vehicle and she actually hit her head on the air-conditioning unit and received some stitches in her forehead so it was about fifteen or sixteen stitches.
Now considering what had just happened to her that was a relatively minor injury so I’m reading through this incident report and you know, just going through all the formal stuff you know the root cause analysis and blah blah blah but I get to the operator statement and she’s written what she can remember, the last two lines of this operator statement said that I’ve only been wearing my seat belt since the guy in the wheelchair came out and told me what happened to him.
So you know, that’s pretty personally rewarding for me and I reckon I could do these talks for the rest of my life and just that one thing, you know, that one person that I, you know, I’ve contributed towards not getting hurt has been worth it so yeah that’s the reason that I do these talks, is because I believe that, you know, this is the sort of thing that might have made me think a little bit differently about safety and hopefully it can make you think about as well, so I’m Woody, stay safe Australia, see you soon.
