You were alive this morning, when the sun came up...

January 13, 2011 12:27 PM

Think About This is a surprisingly gory, ironically NSFW authentic safety video aimed at keeping factory workers safe, by giving them something to think about.

For the squeamish, here's a textual description of the video. This page also includes stills from the video.

posted by 2bucksplus (67 comments total)

Staplerfahrer Klaus did it first, though not as earnestly.
posted by Schlimmbesserung at 12:30 PM on January 13, 2011 [12 favorites]

That sure was Yikes.
posted by Evernix at 12:32 PM on January 13, 2011

Every time I hear of someone named Klaus I think "Das ist Klaus," and then it's nothing but forklift impalings in my head for the next ten minutes.
posted by echo target at 12:34 PM on January 13, 2011 [12 favorites]

Shake Hands With Danger is a little less gory, but I love its Johnny Paycheck-esque theme song. MST3K fans will especially enjoy the Rifftrax version.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:35 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

As someone pointed out in the youtube comments, the song sounds like a lost Portishead hit. Weird.
posted by elwoodwiles at 12:36 PM on January 13, 2011

That singer was so dreadful, I used my hearing protectors.
posted by dhartung at 12:37 PM on January 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

Ha, I was just looking for that link, Schlimmbesserung.

There's quite a few examples of the genre, honestly, but Klaus the Forklift Driver is actually funny. I know Rifftrax has also done several workplace safety videos. (Shake Hands With Danger and Down and Out, at least.)
posted by kmz at 12:37 PM on January 13, 2011

Holy mother of christ, that's creepier than the average Saw movie.
posted by newfers at 12:37 PM on January 13, 2011

Dude. Dude.
posted by phunniemee at 12:38 PM on January 13, 2011 [3 favorites]

Not as horrifying as the "There Are No Accidents" PSA's, but still pretty damn creepy. Maybe the singer had a lot to do with that.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 12:40 PM on January 13, 2011

As a safety semi-pro, I'm torn between the scary "There are no accidents" type videos and the more uplifting "Embrace Life" ones or even the humorous Klaus video. Each one I suppose speaks to a different audience.
posted by Standeck at 12:42 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

For those wondering if this is real company and a real safety film: yes, (also you can now get many of these fine safety videos on DVD).
posted by 2bucksplus at 12:42 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

I wish hadn't watched that. That's show my father died.

Every single way shown. It's how he died. He was especially clumsy, and it was a very bad day.
posted by Astro Zombie at 12:43 PM on January 13, 2011 [16 favorites]

As if I didn't have enough to worry about. Now I have to remember to not accidentally yank off my own big toe when removing my sneakers at work.
posted by vverse23 at 12:45 PM on January 13, 2011 [4 favorites]

Dude, Schlimmbesserung. That's what that video was? Man, I remember the first time I saw that playing randomly on one of the televisions at the 9:30 Club (the old one) in D.C. at like 15 years old at my first live show. What a weird memory...
posted by daq at 12:50 PM on January 13, 2011

That was pretty baffling. "I think I'll come to work with a work boot on one foot, and a sneaker on the other." Has this come up that often? It's like warning against wearing copper chain mail at the steel refinery.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 12:50 PM on January 13, 2011

"Hey, Bob. Could you go look around inside the giant human head shredding machine? I think it's broken."

"Should I wear a helmet?"

"Don't be a pussy, dude."
SpoonFilms 4 weeks ago
posted by louche mustachio at 12:56 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

Industrial accidents are all too common. That's why you should stick to DIY.
posted by Decani at 1:00 PM on January 13, 2011

NSFW work safety video? Oh, the irony!

Seriously, where do you work?
posted by cjorgensen at 1:05 PM on January 13, 2011 [5 favorites]

Heh. Dude got totally baled.
posted by tigrefacile at 1:07 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

That was somehow worse than Staplerfahrer Klaus. Maybe the reduced video quality, maybe the raspy sound and built-in text effects.. But mainly in how nonchalant the injuries were. Staplerfahrer quickly becomes a parody of itself while this somehow has a stronger tie to reality in how injuries will simply creep up on you - and when they do that's it.
posted by pyrex at 1:16 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

wow. i am recording the audio to put into shuffle mode. thank you, 2bucksplus.
posted by the aloha at 1:20 PM on January 13, 2011

I actually screamed and backed out 20 seconds in when that guy shoved down the batting with his foot even though nothing bad happened because I knew This Would Not End Well. I'm Canadian and have been well-trained by our PSAs. (See: "There are no accidents" linked above.)
posted by maudlin at 1:21 PM on January 13, 2011

I would have been so unsurprised to have seen Chris Morris at the end. It was the dodgy video quality and that song...
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 1:24 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm torn between the scary "There are no accidents" type videos.

Holy shit. I thought that was a pre-roll Youtube advertisment for car insurance or something. Caught me off guard.
posted by yeti at 1:26 PM on January 13, 2011

Staplerfahrer quickly becomes a parody of itself

It is a parody.
posted by kmz at 1:35 PM on January 13, 2011

What's that British thing with the kids dying on a farm? Was that even British? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
posted by mr_roboto at 1:44 PM on January 13, 2011

What's that British thing with the kids dying on a farm? Was that even British? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

I'm pretty sure there was an FPP on that one a while back. Can't seem to find it now, though, although here's a list of other disturbing British public-safety films (warning, some involve tentacles).
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:55 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

How was that NSFW? I thought it was well established in movies & TV that gratuitous mutilation & death are OK to depict, but boobies are not.
posted by UbuRoivas at 1:57 PM on January 13, 2011

Ironic to put NSFW on this post when people regularly view exactly these types of videos during their first few days of employment at nearly any job requiring you to move, at all.
posted by odinsdream at 2:03 PM on January 13, 2011

I wonder if these are the people who made the video, or they just distribute it: CompSource Oklahoma

And the video IS called "Think About This"
posted by tittergrrl at 2:09 PM on January 13, 2011

Whoops, missed 2bucksplus's comment!
posted by tittergrrl at 2:13 PM on January 13, 2011

America's favorite Deacon of Death stars in "The Days of Our Years" (MST3K version) and showcases three different railroad-related industrial accidents.
posted by Servo5678 at 2:24 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

Makes me wanna go have a safety meeting.
posted by Mister Fabulous at 2:31 PM on January 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

mr_roboto: Mum and Dad are Getting Ready for the Party.
posted by crush-onastick at 2:36 PM on January 13, 2011

The Apaches link, specifically. But it appears to have been taken down. Sorry.
posted by crush-onastick at 2:37 PM on January 13, 2011

Thanks Horace Rumpole, there's a great soundtrack show on a local college radio station that plays Shake Hands with Danger and I always wondered where it's from.

I know a guy who's the safety manager at his construction firm. He's someone stressed and bitter about how frustrating a job it is to get guys to pay attention to safety. Partly it sounds like he's given responsibility but no authority.
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:42 PM on January 13, 2011

What's that British thing with the kids dying on a farm? Was that even British? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
posted by mr_roboto at 9:44 PM on January 13

Apaches
posted by Decani at 2:45 PM on January 13, 2011

Yeah, Apaches. That was it. Too bad they've taken it down.
posted by mr_roboto at 2:45 PM on January 13, 2011

Or did they?!!!?!?
posted by mr_roboto at 2:46 PM on January 13, 2011

Ah - this looks like the complete version of Apaches.
posted by Decani at 2:47 PM on January 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

My favourite workplace accident story:

On 30 September, three workers were preparing a small batch of fuel for the JOYO experimental fast breeder reactor (FBR), using uranium enriched to 18.8% uranium-235 (235U). It was JCO's first batch of fuel for that reactor in three years, and no proper qualification and training requirements appear to have been established to prepare those workers for the job. At around 10:35, when the volume of solution in the precipitation tank reached about 40 liters, containing about 16 kg uranium, a critical mass was reached.

They were using buckets to mix fuel by hand for a breeder reactor.
posted by KokuRyu at 2:56 PM on January 13, 2011 [6 favorites]

I feel like this thread would be incomplete without my favorite safety video, albeit about bije safety.
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:57 PM on January 13, 2011

Jesus Christ...

I feel weak just watching that.

Holy crap.
posted by orbis23 at 3:13 PM on January 13, 2011

Peter Murphy should do a cover of this...
posted by markkraft at 3:14 PM on January 13, 2011

Sounds like "Signal 30", which I had to watch in driver's ed back in the day. I hated that, and I won't watch this one. I don't need to see blood and body parts, even in B/W.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 3:34 PM on January 13, 2011

When I was a volunteer firefighter, I went to a conference where the keynote speaker was a plastic surgeon who did work on people with chainsaw injuries. Every so often between extremely gory slides, he would have a picture of, say, an apple or a rose. "Now, for something else that is red!"

Granted, the biggest gasps that went up through the audience were not the "before" pictures, but the incredible "after" pictures of what he had been able to surgically do with someone who had a chainsaw kick back into their face.

Oh yeah, then we had lunch.
posted by Wuggie Norple at 4:00 PM on January 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

Apaches is just fucking incredible, thanks Decani. Great writing, great child actors, great farmyard death.

My favourite line: "That is because you are thick." Ha!

*~Spoilers~* The only trick they miss is not showing the fourth kid getting his stuff packed up after he gets crushed by the gate. Though he's only referred to dismissively as "Robert" in the opening roll call, sans Apache warrior honorific, so I guess the kid that leads all his friends to gory hayseed death didn't much care if Rob snuffed it or not.

Also:

Does that kid drown in a vat of cow shit?
posted by Chichibio at 4:07 PM on January 13, 2011

Oh, and thanks to mr_roboto for bringing it up in the first place!
posted by Chichibio at 4:10 PM on January 13, 2011

This reminded me of the PEPCON disaster. When you watch the video on Spike tv, you don't get a real sense of how much panic it caused for the entire city of Henderson. At the time we were still a relatively small town. Everyone knew everyone, that sort of thing. My husband's mom worked about 1 mile from the plant and his dad made the immediate assumption that she was dead. What an awful thing to have to go through. Almost everyone I knew had damage to their homes.

I was in elementary school about 5 miles away from the plant when it exploded. I remember the classroom shaking violently and ceiling tiles falling down. We all ran screaming from the room, which of course all the other kids and teachers in the school were trying to do at the same time. Complete pandemonium. When we got outside we had a pretty good view of the cloud. To my 7 year old brain it seemed logical that a plane had crashed. Basically we all stood around trading theories about what had happened, but a lot of kids were wondering about their family members. I can only imagine what the older kids and adults who recognized the gravity of the situation were thinking.

Eventually the teachers realized that whatever was in the air might not be good for our lungs so they herded us back inside. My dad lived really close and worked from home, so he picked my brother and I up quickly and we left town. We actually had to find a back route to get out because the police were not allowing people to leave the city. Imagine that happening in Vegas in the age of the internets. We were still in the cold war, and a lot of people thought that we had been bombed by the Russians.

Anyway, I grew up and got a degree in chemistry and eventually worked for an industrial plant nearby which focuses an enormous amount of energy and time on safety, for which I am profoundly thankful. A few months back we had a fire at a tire yard just behind the same industrial area in Henderson. It wasn't immediately clear that a plant wasn't on fire, and yet no news choppers were in the air and no report appeared in the news until late that night. No one seemed to remember PEPCON. My husband and I saw the smoke from the recent fire and immediately thought the same thing: let's get out of here. Of course, we drove towards the fire instead. Dey gav me uh dugree. :)
posted by Cheminatrix at 4:19 PM on January 13, 2011 [3 favorites]

Thiiiink abou-out thiiiis: the vocals were more horrifying than any of the accidents shown.
posted by bwg at 4:27 PM on January 13, 2011 [2 favorites]

Having now watched Apaches for the first time, I am now convinced that there is no deadlier place on earth than a quaint English farm.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:45 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

I think I will punish my children by showing them an Apaches/Threads double-feature
posted by KokuRyu at 6:05 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

Actually the one that made me wince the most was the guy sliding his hand along the top of the sheet metal. Probably the easiest injury to recover from, but I know that delayed pain receptor feeling caused by sharp objects. Getting baled on the other hand, that's just funny.
posted by mike_bling at 6:37 PM on January 13, 2011

**BUTT PUCKER ALERT!**
posted by ~Sushma~ at 6:42 PM on January 13, 2011 [1 favorite]

I still prefer this increasingly violent German forklift safety video. As a non-German speaker, I can't even guess if it's intentionally absurd or not.
posted by ddbeck at 7:20 PM on January 13, 2011

My boss' father was a city maintenance worker who died on the job. Got run over by a steamroller. Like in the cartoons. Don't know if his body left a person-shaped dent in the pavement.

Once upon a time I wrote the company-wide safety manual for an interesting organization. Only company in the state subject to the particular regulatory requirement. Ended up with some neurological damage from that place due to unforseen airborne chemical exposure.

Not who I used to be. But I used to be a real dick.

I have a weird intuition about mechanical systems. I trust it. That's why I won't use the tablesaw in my garage. My partner wants me to give it away, but I'm hesitant. I think it is poised to cause harm.

At work, I won't use certain tools if I'm in the shop alone. I don't get any weird spidy-sense like I do with the tablesaw in my garage. I just know how bad things can go when they go. And I always wear safety glasses around things that spin fast and eat stuff.

Saw a guy chop off three fingers in a punch press once. After he left and had a ride to the ER, I picked his fingers out of the press with tweezers, packed them on ice, and sent them along in another car, just in case the doctors would find them useful. They didn't, but it was still the right thing to do.

There's some part of me that sometimes wonders if there's an injustice in the risk exposure for wages and whatnot. But the riskiest things people do, we tend to do on our own time rather than on the clock. Yet there's an order-of-magnitude kind of effect once you concentrate forces into a production environment.

Anyway.

That tablesaw. It troubles me. Never will use it. Don't think anyone should.
posted by yesster at 10:06 PM on January 13, 2011 [5 favorites]

We had a carpenter who cut off part of a finger using a table saw in our basement once. My dad drove him the eight blocks to the hospital, with the finger in ice (I know, these days you're supposed to use cold water).

While discussing Gabby Giffords tonight, my mom said the same guy once got power-nailed in the head "and he recovered completely". I hadn't known. But I think carpentry might not be his thing.
posted by dhartung at 11:09 PM on January 13, 2011

This would be more effective if each vignette of a worker getting maimed had some Oompa Loompas come in and sing a demeaning safety lesson before dragging the guy off screen to some disturbing yet uncertain fate.
posted by dgaicun at 1:13 AM on January 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

My paternal grandfather was a construction foreman, and after retirement, loved to garden and do carpentry. From as early as I can remember, he'd teach me about safety by using real-life examples (imagine this in a very loud voice, because he was mostly deaf from his years in construction without proper hearing protection): "now honey, see this lawnmower? Only Grampa can use it, because it has blades." Then he shows me the blades (the mower was off). "See these blades? They're very sharp, that's how they cut grass. Once saw a guy chop his foot up."

Cutting some dowels to use as logs for a wood log truck he'd made me: "Now, put on this helmet, just in case anything flies off, and ear plugs to protect your ears, 'cause that's how Grampa got deaf, and here are some glasses for ya. They're too big but that's okay. Once had a guy whose eye got put out. You stay over there far away from the table saw, okay? Grampa's going to cut your dowels, you'll see, it goes really fast! Now, watch Grampa? You want to keep your hands and arms away from the blade, like this, and always watch it. I'll never forget the time a guy wouldn't listen to me and got his damned fingers cut off. Y'know your uncle worked with a guy who used a power nailer and put it through his foot? ...your parents got you tetanos shots, right?" I nodded. "Good. You ever get a nail through your foot, you go straight to the doctor anyway, okay, tetanos is bad stuff." "Okay Grampa." "And once you're a grown-up, just don't ever use a power nailer. Damned things. We have hammers for a reason." "But you can hit your fingers with a hammer, Grampa!" "That's true, dear! But it's a lot better than getting a nail through your finger. Could lose your damned finger that way." "Ahhh I see."
posted by fraula at 1:23 AM on January 14, 2011 [3 favorites]

OH MY GOD.. That German Forklift safety video is something else.
posted by defcom1 at 3:48 AM on January 14, 2011

Ah yes, I now know what the forklift video reminded me of:
The legend of Riki-Oh (Google Video NSFW for excessive crazy-ass gore)
posted by defcom1 at 3:58 AM on January 14, 2011

Chichibio: "Does that kid drown in a vat of cow shit?"

Haven't watched the Apaches video, but that is a (for urbanites anyway) surprisingly common way to go. As a kid growing up in the countryside, you would continuously be told to steer clear of the liquid manure vats.
posted by brokkr at 4:09 AM on January 14, 2011

My favourite line: "That is because you are thick." Ha!

And I'd say the manner of her death tended to bear out the truth of that statement. :-)

Also:

Does that kid drown in a vat of cow shit?


Slurry. Nice way to go, eh?

I like the way the narrator kid was always so surprised by how boring the adult's "parties" were. I think all those kids were a bit lacking up top. Fun to watch that again, though.
posted by Decani at 4:10 AM on January 14, 2011

I always remember being lectured by my father about railroad safety (he worked as a hostler for many freight lines). Maybe he thought I was a hobo or something because he always thought I would jump the cars. Um....seeing that I wasn't allowed to go anywhere by myself, train jumping wasn't going to happen. I remember him saying one day he had a horrible day. Two trains being connected, guy was in the middle of the trains, and...oops.

I work at a cozy cush desk job. The most horrific yet humorous video we've seen is about sexual harassment. Some guy outwardly gets smarmy and physical with a worker while she's holding coffee. All she does is tell him to 'buzz off, Phil'. My version would have been throwing the hot coffee in Phil's face causing 3rd degree burns. But I'm twisted like that.
posted by stormpooper at 6:55 AM on January 14, 2011

My father was a senior design engineer at a factory that made....things (he was one of those "work-just-for-the-paycheck" kind of guys, and always thought it was too boring to talk about much -- I think they made various rubber gizmos for the innards of other machines).

One day he went to some mandatory safety meeting that everyone had to go to, designers and shop floor guys alike. They screened a video about the importance of protecting one's hearing; about halfway through, they had a whole series of clips designed to promote "imagine the sounds you would miss if you lost your hearing" or some such. And they had a series of clips emphasizing these "favorite sounds" -- chirping birds, giggling kids in a playground, a band playing music, yadda yadda.

But then one of the clips they showed was a pair of hands opening a beer can, and the resulting "Pssssshhhht." Dad says that at that, the entire audience, who had been watching all bored, burst out laughing and started cheering, all, "now THAT'S a good sound!"

I kind of wanted to meet the guy who made that film and give him kudos for knowing his audience.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:59 AM on January 14, 2011

I wonder if there are any safety videos for the safety film industry?
posted by orme at 9:11 AM on January 14, 2011 [2 favorites]