Safety Speaker John Drebinger’s Book Excerpt – Would You Watch Out For My Safety?™

As a safety speaker I have had the privilege of sharing life saving techniques for many years. In my book, “Would You Watch Out For My Safety?™” (Click Here to Purchase) I share five reasons why people would want to watch out for the safety of others. Here is an excerpt from the book talking about the fourth reason.

The fourth reason to watch out for others’ safety is of benefit to you. This reason is to avoid the personal pain or guilt of realizing you could have done something. I almost had one of those. We were driving to the airport at 4:10 in the morning. My wife, Karen, was in the car with me. It was pitch black outside and I was zipping down the road. As we were driving along, I decided to change the radio station.

All of a sudden, I hear her yell, “Cow!” I look up and at first I don’t see a cow. Finally, I see a little white stripe on the top of this very big animal and I swerved to miss it. Karen watched out for our safety and said something. It’s a good thing because I was distracted at that moment. If she hadn’t said something or if she hadn’t been going to the airport with me, I would have hit the cow.

Something happened after that I found significant. I was sitting on the airplane waiting for my flight to take off and the phone rang. It was my wife and she said, “Hi.”

I said, “Thanks for the ride.”

She said, “Great. Have a good flight.” She said, “By the way, I took a different route home.”

I said, “Really? Why is that?”

She said, “”I was listening to the radio on the drive back from the airport and they said there was a wreck – a big truck had run into a cow on Christensen Road.” I felt bad and I was glad it was a big truck because I knew the driver wouldn’t get hurt. I thought, that was a close call for me, wasn’t it? I hadn’t thought of reporting the hazard because living in the country means livestock on the road at times.

What if that had been somebody taking their child to school? By the way, how much worse would I have felt if it was one of those parents who don’t buckle their child in a safety belt? What if their collision with the cow caused the child to go flying out of the window and be killed? What kind of ache in my heart would I have had for the rest of my life? Now, when I see hazards on the road I report them right away. I don’t want the pain and the guilt of saying, “Hey, you should have done something, or you could have done something.”

Here is an example of someone who will never have the nightmare of someone getting hurt or killed because he didn’t intervene. A plant manager of a refinery, where I was as a safety speaker, doing my safety talks, gave an opening safety share that was awesome. He began by saying, “Something interesting happened yesterday.” He reported, “I’m at the gas station getting gas and there was somebody standing at the pump pumping gas, smoking a cigarette.” So he said, “I went over to the person and explained to him smoking while pumping gas is very hazardous and it would be better if they didn’t smoke while they were pumping gas.”

“At that point, the smoker told me some places I might want to go on my next vacation.” I thought that was a rather elegant way of putting it. He then said, “You don’t understand. There are some children in a car here and if all of a sudden that flares up, the heat from that, just the radiant heat, could burn their tender skin. God forbid if it transferred the fire to their car. We might not get them out of their car seats fast enough. That would be really tragic.”

At that point, the person told him some places he could stick certain things in certain orifices of his body, at which point, the plant manager said, “Okay, fine.” He walked over to the wall, where there’s a switch, which all gas stations have, hit it and he turned off every pump in the gas station. Everybody looked over at him and he pointed over to the person smoking. Then they stared at him.

Now, did that person stop smoking cigarettes at gas pumps? My guess is, no. But, I can guarantee you that plant manager will never feel bad he didn’t say something. He will never have the nightmare of watching flames engulf a car with children in it thinking to himself, “What if I’d said something?”

What I want people to think with regard to this is what pain you would experience if something happened and you chose not to warn someone. You can think back in your life to times when you thought, “Gee, should I?” and you didn’t. If it had gone the other way, how would you have felt? I can say, “If that hadn’t been a truck that hit that cow, I know my feelings about that incident would have been a whole lot more dramatic.” That would have caused a lot more pain the rest of my life. So, another reason you want to watch out for people’s safety is to avoid pain in your life.

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