@huffy-the-bicycle-slayer honestly I think this was a massive missed opportunity on the part of the government. I literally learned stuff from osha-official that I proceeded to use IN A VERY REAL OSHA COMPLAINT that resulted in my (now-former) job facing some very serious consequences (as in “you have 48 hours to present a plan and timeline to fix this or we’re shutting you down” consequences). The OSHA employee who handled my complaint said it was one of the best-written and most comprehensive he’d seen in the 20 years he’d been doing the job. The bullet-pointing and management jargon I learned elsewhere, but the forklift certification issues and the lack of adequate safety exits? That was YOU.
It’s not a joke that your blog may have saved lives at my job, because out of eleven infractions I turned in, five were deemed to be “an immediate threat to life and safety.” The government should have offered you a paycheck to keep going as an actual OSHA employee, because you were absolutely teaching us stuff that makes our jobs safer and told us what resources to use if we needed to swing the OSHA club at our bosses and you were doing it in a format that was accessible and popular with your audience. That should be any organization’s absolute DREAM.
So if they won’t thank you, I will: on behalf of about 100 employees who are no longer working in a building full of flammables with no fire extinguishers and no exits from the entire back half of the building, a building where uncertified forklift drivers rammed into support columns and made the walls shake, a building where the HVAC system was full of black mold, thank you, for giving me the tools and courage to pick up the phone and fix the problem.
