hazardous jobs

When I worked for one of the baby bells, I often found myself working in very old telecom buildings. Many of these buildings were known to have things like asbestos in the walls, and sometimes there were notices posted on the walls indicating this. At other times, you just needed to assume that there *might* be asbestos in the wall, and make sure anyone penetrating a wall had a HEPA vac and the correct prep/cleanup materials with them.

I often worked with individuals much younger than myself, which was surprising since I was in my early twenties. In many cases, these "kids" (as I liked to call them) received very little training about the dangers of working with materials like asbestos, and I always worried that there may be situations where they might not know to protect themselves if there weren't obvious notices posted on the walls warning them of the hazards within. In fact, the work that they were doing could injure me, too, just from being in the same area. In this case, I would hope that they would have received the appropriate training, and much more, that they would remember the training that they had.

Unfortunately, all of that OSHA-type training stuff is very dry and boring, and it's often difficult to remember. Some people are out to change that. One new site that I ran across at PPP for asbestos information attempts to take a grim subject and associate it with somewhat humorous medical photos. Sure, it may seem a little tasteless or uncouth, but you can't argue that humans seem to retain information better when they tie an emotion to it, even if it was tongue-in-cheek laughter. Scroll down to the bottom of their site for links to some humorous photos.