There was blood

A fascinating turn of events at work today. It started because of an extended power cut.

About 11am this morning, the power went out, and the generator was out of diesel. The UPS units lasted for an hour or so, but soon the computers shut down and we were sitting idle. Eventually some went down to smoke and the others were walking around the office visiting other sections that had power. As I was standing downstairs chatting with someone, the tallest guy in our office, V, came running to me with his palm on his head. "I hurt myself, could you please take a look?" he said, even as blood started appearing from his scalp, flowing down over his forehead. Turned out he had bumped his head on the sharp edge of the cover for a shutter. This was bound to happen since the stairs area narrow and have low ceilings.

We rushed him to the hospital and then the circus started. Our boss made a few calls to the finance dept. asking them to go to the hospital and pay for the bills. Then he called the Health and Safety department of the company to make an injury report. An hour later I got a call from the HR asking me if it was I that got injured. I told her I wasn't but gave her the story. Turned out she got a call from the Dubai office asking if a certain person with my name got injured! (V's last name is similar to my first name so that explained the last part.) But I was surprised that the Dubai office heard about this this fast, and since the HR was calling as a courtesy, and not in her capacity as HR, it was clear that it leaked out of the Dubai office as gossip! Fifteen minutes later our manager, who had driven V to the hospital got called, to file an incident report. At this point out manager who, as I've mentioned before, isn't the more mature guy in the office, started complaining about how much paper work he had to file. He was doing this to be funny, but it was clearly bad form to make the injured guy feel bad, even if you don't intend to do so. I wanted to tell him, "Dude, I'm so sorry that V's injury is causing you this much pain. I'm sure V will no longer band his head so hard that he bleeds to save you some paper work." (V was fine by the way, no stitches, just a bandage and some pills.) The manager had to fill out a bunch of forms and had to narrate the entire story over the phone to an HR supervisor from Singapore! The story of this incident had already spread to three countries and four time zones!

Another hour or so later the facilities manager came up to check on V, and without even asking a "How are you?" he started on a tirade about how we are careless and that he can't be bothered to keep worrying about HSE if we keep running into things! Now that pissed me off! It wasn't like V woke up that morning and decided to run into a sharp edge. All the facilities manager has to do now is to either file down the sharp edge, or just cover it with some padding. He refused to do that! "Do you know how much time it's going to take? This is a very wide corridor, if you guys insist on running into these edges, I can't keep covering up all sharp edges." Umm, hello? That is exactly what you're supposed to do, that's what you get paid for. Instead he kept shouting at us, all this while V was sitting there. He apologized later saying that he was hungry and that that might have made him a little angrier. But basically he felt it wasn't his problem.

To be fair to him, it is possible that someone from above might have yelled at him and he was just trying to take it out on us. But that doesn't excuse the fact that he was way out of line in blaming V for the injury. It's amazing how many times the buck got passed around these past few hours. No one wants to be blamed for this. And no one is blaming either, just suggesting things to avoid situations like this in the future. But all that has happened so far is that the dirty attitudes of some people here have been exposed.