We have to review safety at the office. It's a big deal, so we have a meeting about it every two weeks for 30 minutes. At the two most recent meetings, we have been discussing a potentially fatal workplace injury, mostly arguing over how to classify and rate it properly. The hazard? Paper cuts. Yeah. Someone found an incident online where a woman nearly died from an infected paper cut, so we argued over whether this constitutes a potential fatality.
The answer is that it does, no matter how unlikely. And the arguments go on from there. Do hazard control measures eliminate the potential injury? Never. Do they lower the probability of serious injury? Well, the lowest rating our chart allows is "rare/very unlikely", and we already said that's the likelihood, so no, further measures do not officially decrease the probability.
Our facilitator tried three different tactics to argue us out of our quandary: (1) you should use the most likely outcome for assessing the risk, (2) if we classify paper cuts as a potential fatality, we will make you wear protective equipment to handle paper and (3) a paper cut is not actually going to kill you because the infection a secondary hazard.
In summary, we have so far spent 90 minutes of 10 people's time discussing whether or not you can die from a paper cut. Total cost to the company so far: approximately $400.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - This is definitely a Dilbert moment.
PPS - The most obvious one I've had so far.
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