Announcer:

Dave and Bacon's Safety Tales. The only industrial safety podcast that brings you common sense advice on job site safety, standards, regulations, and industry best practices without putting you to sleep.

Fred:

Welcome to another exciting episode of Dave and Bacon's Safety Tales, episode five. We've made it to five.

Dave:

Cinco.

Fred:

If you're still with us, I'm surprised.

Dave:

But good for you because hopefully you have some level of give a shit about safety.

Fred:

That's right. Fred here with Quad City Safety with my partner Dave. Once again, if you don't know who we are yet, I've had some years in the safety business as a PPE supplier. We've seen it all. Today, the topic, it's super exciting, first aid.

Dave:

Yeah, not like a Walmart peel apart thing that they give you that's got on band aid and maybe a half a unit of Neosporin but basically, legitimate first aid. Not trauma first aid, we're not all required to have an ambulance sitting outside our office.

Fred:

But maybe you shouldn't be sitting at your house and saying first aid? Yeah, I got whiskey and duct tape, we're good to go.

Dave:

Yeah, yeah. I think it's more of a planning thing because the way that it's really looked at is it's not really like a firm, firm standard. It's more of a voluntary standard so it's not like they're going to shut your business down. But realistically, it's more if we get a minor cut or laceration, it's meant to be first aid. Again, that's not aftercare, first aid means the aid that's given first to stabilize there.

Fred:

Yeah, but you have had times in your life where you've used alcohol as first aid, haven't you?

Dave:

Yeah, quite a bit. I use it as a pain masking agent all the time.

Fred:

There's got to be a good story in there. Sometime you tripped and fall, your ankle swells two to three times and you're like, give me some whiskey.

Dave:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But unfortunately, those are not some of my prouder moments of my life, but yeah, they're out there. There's a lot of you that are listening that probably have at least one.

Fred:

Yeah, for sure. All right, story of the day, do you want to get into your story?

Dave:

Well, the story goes back to the fact that I grew up in Kentucky and spent most of my early age running around creek banks and surrounded by people that may not have had a college education but had done it the way they'd done it. It's not really much of a story as much as some little instances that stick out in my mind. I can remember going back to my Granny White and you would have a rash and she'd go, "We need to mix up a poultice."

Fred:

Poultice?

Dave:

Yeah, poultice. It'd be a combination of herbs and whatever.

Fred:

Witches potion?

Dave:

Yeah, pretty much. A little bit of newt's ear and all kinds of stuff in it that was whooped up as a compress or whatever. I can remember probably one of the first times I got stung by a bee, being that we're rolling around north Tennessee, tobacco was probably in people's mouths at all time but you get that sting and one of the first things an adult would walk up, wallow a big cheek of tobacco out of it and put it on it. It would actually soothe it. As I started thinking about that, I googled it and was that just in my mind or is there really some effect? I challenge you to go Google it but tobacco is pretty good for bee stings. The chemical composition of it is something that will actually satisfy swelling, pain, and everything related to a bee sting.

Fred:

[inaudible 00:04:19] makes sense because that's what people use the drug for, to numb or to feel a little bit different, take away some pain.

Dave:

I don't think it's necessarily the nicotine or the tar.

Fred:

There's something in there.

Dave:

All the good stuff, maybe the formaldehyde that Philip Morris is impregnating to kill your children with second hand smoke. But that and for instance, it wasn't uncommon for us to get medicines that they might give animals. Watkins salve, my grandmother would smear it on a cow and she'd smear it on us.

Fred:

Hand up, what is Watkins salve?

Dave:

Watkins salve? If you go into a Cracker Barrel these days, they have the Dr. Watkins products. It'll be a metal tin of this ointment and it says Dr. Watkins petro-carbo. You can put that stuff on anything shy of a gunshot wound and it will actually cause you to heal.

Fred:

Okay.

Dave:

I mean, and again-

Fred:

There's something antibiotic in there.

Dave:

There's something in it and obviously they're not doing infomercials on it but I'm telling you, you should. You should probably contact, I think Dr. Watkins is sold by the same kind of folks that sell Avon and stuff like that. They do everything from vanilla flavoring to Watkins petro-carbo salve to there's a whole line of products though. I, to this day, have multiple cans of petro-carbo. I have one in my medicine cabinet, I have one in my first aid kit, and my kids, actually, we refer it as peter grease because it's really, really oily and nasty but man, I'm telling you, any scratch, abrasion, cut, I don't care what it is, Watkins petro-carbo salve will clear it up, clean it up.

Fred:

It's a souped up Vaseline?

Dave:

Yeah, basically just from a story standpoint, is I challenge everybody to visualize in your head how you were treated, what first aid, whether it was that first real shitty slide into home that you did in kindergarten and cut-

Fred:

On the rock gravel baseball fields.

Dave:

Yeah, that they hadn't even raked or you caught some of that old seven up coke glass and just lacerated the hell out of yourself as you slid across it and treated there.

Fred:

Okay. All right, just redneck shit, got you. Anyways, main points here that we need to hit on, if you're working out on the road, your construction crew and your truck, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have first aid. You don't have to have that kit hanging on the wall to have first aid.

Dave:

These days they make kits ready to go. There's 10, 25, 50 man kits. Kits that can be put, a lot of them will refer to it as a truck kit. They make builds that will have your basic components in it for whatever environment. Obviously it's up to you to really dig deep and figure out what can go wrong. Obviously if it's an office area, a paper cut or a mild headache that just needs some aspirins or some kind of tablets to treat.

Fred:

Yeah, those kits, basically, they're cheap enough that if you have 20 guys out there in 20 different trucks, you can throw a little $20 kit in everyone's truck and pretty much have then covered.

Dave:

Absolutely. They're disposable so once you break into it and use it, sometimes if you have a big kit that you want to refill, that's good, but if you have an accident and somebody needs to be treated, they should break into that kit, use it, and just treat it as a disposable item because let's face it, $20 when you have an accident, you're pissing in the wind to try to refill that and repackage it.

Fred:

Yeah. Providing the right first aid supplies to your workers can save you thousands of dollars of cost of fines, right?

Dave:

Well, yeah, obviously there's always that duty, the general duty clause is going to pick up that if you hurt somebody, you should try to pre-treat them and then get them to whether it's a clinic or anything after that. You're responsible for providing first aid or not necessarily triage, we're not talking hunker down war stuff where-

Fred:

We're not talking ER visit.

Dave:

We're pulling up into the civil war camp and we're going to hack half your leg off. You don't have to self perform any of that stuff but you do need to make sure that you have somebody that's trained in first aid and how to properly administer the stuff in it and most first aid kits will have a basic book on let's say it's a bee sting or something that's minor. Sometimes you can handle those without sending somebody to a clinic with just a basic band aid.

Fred:

Really, we're just providing out workers with the accessibility to the first aid kit.

Dave:

Right in the line with toilet paper. If you're going to supply toilet paper, I don't think it's out of line to supply them with some band aids and triple antibiotic or some stuff like that.

Fred:

Something to make it burn or something like that, they're good to go. Really, whether workers are on site or on the road, you should have some sort of first aid there on hand for them.

Dave:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fred:

All right. How about different types of first aid kits, what's their purpose?

Dave:

Well, the way that the standard originally, it's an anti standard and it came out with some basics because when you went to buy a first aid kit, one first aid kit said first aid kit and the next one said first aid kit and there was completely different stuff in them. The first provision that came out and I believe it was seven items, it was basic stuff like you need to have some eyewash, you need to have some band aids, you need to have a triangle bandage, you need to have. It was basically to make sure that you had items that were completely necessary to where when you said you had a first aid kit, you didn't open it and go well, we have triple antibiotic and no band aids. That was the first anti standard that came out that hit that. It's progressed a little bit and just in the last, I want to say 2015, there was another revision to the standard that said well, let's think about this a little bit deeper. We have somebody that's in an office area that doesn't really need a lot of stuff but let's say we have somebody that is in a at heights construction site or a more aggressive environment.

They made class A and class B type kits to where if you don't need a lot of stuff, there's one build. If you might be able to break a bone or whatever that might come up, it's a little bit more aggressive, that you're able to again provide that first aid and have stuff on site that meets those needs. Again, you have those class A and B and then you have sub-sections, which are types, which is more of the box that it's in. Is the box meant to be inside? Is it meant to be outside? Does it need to be, if you went a class B type four, that would in my mind hit man, we're working on an oil rig. We need to make sure that we can throw this thing in the ocean and it's water tight and it's got a lot of good stuff. A lot of heavier stuff so we've been able to break bones and maybe have a splint in there or something that again, is more aggressive to provide first aid.

Fred:

Otherwise, it's pretty much just size, right? The size of the kit is in relation to how many people are on site?

Dave:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's scales and again, that basic standard that was seven and has grown to a couple additional items is there's a number of band aids that you're supposed to keep, do you have to have tweezers, do you have to have eye washes? Then you scale based on how many people as to how many of those you have because I guess they've done some statistical variations to figure out if you're on a site with 50 guys, you're going to need probably twice the amount of band aids that you did when you had the 25 men.

Fred:

What about size of facility? Is there surface area that you have to have it so close in proximity to people or do you just have to have access inside the building?

Dave:

You really need to have access in the building but again if we're talking a huge, huge area or we're talking construction site where we may have a job trailer and we're working way away from that, obviously we would want to have one in the truck because again, first aid should be able to be supplied very close to where the incident occurs.

Fred:

In a manufacturing plant or something like that where they might have 25 different first aid kits in there, is that more about covering the amount of people or is that just them going above and beyond to have access to what you actually need?

Dave:

That's more access that's providing, again, immediate access. Because let's say-

Fred:

Having the attendant walk to get something bandage or something.

Dave:

Let's go, we're in a manufacturing facility and we're working around metals and we get a really bad laceration. Well, obviously direct pressure is the first means. We don't want to immediately apply a tourniquet, we want to try to apply direct pressure to see if we can get that bleeding under control.

Fred:

You don't want to like in the movies where a guy rips off his sleeve.

Dave:

Nobody wants me to-

Fred:

Rip off a sleeve and tie your flannel shirt around his arm.

Dave:

I don't think that that's how to say, while I appreciate the manliness of it, I don't really think that that's really, it's going to be frowned upon. Having those compresses or blood stoppers or whatever that is close, hopefully, we can access it quickly. We don't want to have a 25 man first aid kit for a 50 acre facility. Somebody cuts themselves and bleeds out because we didn't have anything to really combat that with.

Fred:

Yeah. That little thought right there brings me to what the next topic that we were thinking about was why are you a dickhead if you don't have life saving first aid and an AEB on site?

Dave:

Well, probably just because it's not really as expensive as it used to be.

Fred:

Okay.

Dave:

We're talking, like we talked, a base level first aid kit, you're looking at $20-25. You're kind of an asshole if you, it'd be kind of like taking the toilet paper out of the bathroom and saying wipe with your hand. The world's changed a little bit so again, it's something that it's easy and it's readily available and it's not a lot of cost to really comply with that.

Fred:

How about, have you thought emergency wise to your topic there, you're in the bathroom and it really goes down and there's no toilet paper on site. You've already taken care of business, now we're sitting there. What's your move?

Dave:

My move?

Fred:

What's your personal move?

Dave:

Okay, my personal move is-

Fred:

I'm hoping for undershirt myself.

Dave:

No, no, no, no. If you ever see my, I wear a lot of shorts, and if you look down and I'm missing a sock-

Fred:

You're a sock guy?

Dave:

I'm a sock guy. I learned a long time ago and it started with you'd be out hunting and obviously you're out there early and usually you suck down that first cup of coffee and you stroll out in the woods and all of a sudden, that caffeine hits the old poop muscle and you're like oh man, I got to get away because first of all, you don't want to defecate by your tree stands because believe it or not, deer can actually smell that. You wander off to do your business and then all of a sudden, you're like oh hell, where's the toilet paper? You end up taking out your knife and cutting the top of your sock off because-

Fred:

It doesn't make enough surface area, I don't know. I guess you may be wearing some tall socks.

Dave:

No, well, you got to think about it. Think about it like a mitt so you wipe on one side then you introvert it so-

Fred:

Twist?

Dave:

No. Crappy sock inside, you have a whole another layer there.

Fred:

Have I ever told you my code poop story?

Dave:

No.

Fred:

Code poop story is I worked at a Lowe's and I may have mentioned this in a prior episode but they have all different kinds of jargon that comes over the loudspeaker. A code three meant that there was more than three people in line so another checkout person needed to come up to the front.

Dave:

That's pretty ingenious.

Fred:

A code 99 meant that we needed to have a manager, a manager needed to show up at this. All of a sudden, my credit card machine jammed up, I can't figure out, my hair's on fire, my line's out so I call for a code 99 so I'll send a manager, he'll come help me out. They had a code 50 and a code 50 was we need someone up front to load. Somebody bought a patio set and they bought a grill and they need help getting in the back of their truck so it was called a code 50. Well, there was a time when I was in our exact scenario in the bathroom and I had my phone on my that I could page overhead with. I got stuck and I waited about five minutes-

Dave:

A phone phone or a Motorola walkie talkie thing?

Fred:

It was a multi-purpose tool. Swiss Army knife of phones. It was a walkie talkie but it was also a phone you could call your [crosstalk 00:18:58].

Dave:

It was those Nextel ones that back in the late 90's where you would have that two way.

Fred:

The 2005 version of that. That came out. My ingenious idea was that I would call for a code 50 because most likely it was going to be another guy that would come up and I knew that code 50 in the men's bathroom. Someone could come up and help me load up would be a code 50 but when I got on the loudspeaker, I called for a code poop. My brain got [inaudible 00:19:29] and I said, "Excuse me, I need to get a code poop to the men's bathroom." I hung up real fast and it hit my head what just happened. All of a sudden my phone rang and my phone rang again, I keep hitting end, I'm not talking to anybody. My phone rang and, "Fred, did you call for a code poop?" I said, "Yes I did." Then I explained to that person what happened.

Dave:

The little weird guy didn't run in pushing a mop bucket or nothing?

Fred:

Nope, nope.

Dave:

Somebody shit in the middle of the floor.

Fred:

There's all kinds of horror stories about, yeah, cleaning bathrooms at those type of places or anywhere.

Dave:

I have had that happen where I've had to use my cellphone, I'll call one of my children-

Fred:

I need some toilet paper.

Dave:

The last one is I didn't have any socks on and so obviously it's summer-

Fred:

That ruined your plan A and plan B.

Dave:

Man, I'm telling you, that was epic fail. I'm in one of those little plastic boxes, throwing it down, it was one that hit me and one where you sweat a little bit and you do that, I don't know, you almost waddle in there. You're done and looking around and you're like okay, oh boy. What am I going to do now? Because it's not like ... You're stuck.

Fred:

Yeah.

Dave:

I mean, I guess you could go with monkey butt and walk around the zoo but I don't believe in that so I call my children on the cell phone and go hey, can you go up to the snack bar? Steal some of the napkins. I think I'm in the third one, just bang on the door and I'll let you know.

Fred:

Yep.

Dave:

The American Heart Association, when you look at CPR, CPR's really logically progressed a lot to where you've had a lot of revisions and now it's not as much about compression, as rescue breathing. When you look at cardiac arrest, part of it is making sure that you're still getting oxygen in there because if you're not pumping anyway, you're not doing anything but doing rescue breathing is probably number one followed by compressions in the near term. The biggest reason or biggest argument for having that AED, which is an Automated External Defibrillator or it produces a shock to the heart that puts it back into its beating format because when you look at the heart and you really look at the science of it, you have the pipes, you have plumbers that work on the plumbing. Those are the people that are going to do making sure that all your blockages and your stints are done and then you have people that deal with the electric part of the heart, which is what keeps it beating through the central nervous system. Applying that shock to get that heart back into a beating standpoint is very important and again, I've rambled on, but let's get to the matter. I have a tendency to run all the way around the barn five times before I come in.

We have limited time. If that heart doesn't start beating within about three or four minutes, we're starting to get into a situation of where we're going to have a vegetable on our hands. We're any oxygen to vital organs and even the brain so let's say that I go down and I'm laying there, I'm on a clock. If somebody doesn't get the old ticker going pretty quick within a small period of time, then in five minutes, I'm probably not going to be able to be revived. The statistical chance of bringing somebody back falls off a cliff, number one. Number two is you're doing irreversible damage to the brain and other organs by not supplying them oxygen. For that small investment, for under two grand, you can have an AED. If you have somebody that's trained in first aid, they should be trained in CPR anyway. It would be like having a carpenter and not giving him a hammer. If you've trained that carpenter on CPR, you should go ahead and give him the hammer, which is his AED so that when he goes in there, he has all the tools he needs to really finish why you've put him where you put him.

Fred:

Yeah, some of the ones they have out on the market now make it so easy that you almost don't need training to be able to go through it. You definitely need training, so don't get me wrong.

Dave:

Yeah, you have to have, you really should have training but if I saw somebody go down and I hadn't been trained on their AED, I'm ripping the damn thing off of the wall and I'm going to give a hell of a try to try to follow because most of them, like you mentioned, I know one of the units that we saw all the time, the first thing it says is remain calm. Okay.

Fred:

I got you machine, I got you Siri.

Dave:

I'm feeling you. They've really put a lot of thought into them. You open them up and it's not like this bullshit schematic like exploded diagram with 50 screws. It's literally like open their shirt, put this pad here, put this pad here, push this button, and listen.

Fred:

Yeah.

Dave:

Do what it says.

Fred:

Then you hit go and it's like you're pushing too hard, you're not pushing hard enough. You're pushing too fast. Yeah, those things, they're pretty slick.

Dave:

To your point is some of them now measure chest compressions and all too often, CPR to people that haven't done it, I mean, if you do CPR correct, you're going to break ribs and it's a very aggressive and hard. You somebody that's given CPR for a couple minutes, they're going to be a hot mess, they're going to be sweating because it's a lot of work. It's not, you see on TV Land, this rocking back and forth with their shoulders, no, I mean-

Fred:

Singing "Staying Alive."

Dave:

Yeah. When you're trying to move somebody's sternum by two, two and a half inches or you don't want to go too far because again, all you're trying to do is bounce that heart off between soft tissue and bones to revive it.

Fred:

Yeah. Well, so sum it all up, while it's vital to be compliant to industry specific safety regulations, there's nothing more important than ensuring your workers are safe. Providing them with the tools and supplies they need to treat injuries, prevent infection can help reduce the severity of injuries and risk to others. We're talking antiseptics, bandages, cold packs, or even AEDs, having the proper safety supplies on site can be the deciding factor in whether that worker goes home at the end of the day.

Dave:

Also, just another caveat that I think people overlook a lot of times also is and each employer's got to evaluate it and decide whether they want to do it but just dispensing basic medicinals or tablets so if Joe Blow comes in with a little bit of a headache, is it worth it to give him fifty cents worth of Tylenol to really hit his headache or maybe, I always like to talk about acute and chronic, maybe that first aid item is sunscreen. Applying sunscreen so we don't have a chronic effect of sun and all of a sudden we're looking at melanoma down the road for things that are cheap. Productivity and also offer basic levels of protection that you should provide anyway.

Fred:

Okay.

Dave:

Unless you're just that guy that has a very low level of give a shit and thinks people are disposable.

Fred:

Yeah. Which there are those guys out there.

Dave:

Yeah, there's a lot of guys. They probably would just hit stop or cancel or whatever.

Fred:

Yeah. That guy could be our dumbass of the week but we'll move on to our favorite segment, the dumbass of the week.

Intro Announcer:

It's the dumbass of the week.

Fred:

I'm assuming that you don't have one.

Dave:

What's that?

Fred:

The way that you're staring.

Dave:

Well, I mean, I'm going to go ahead and put the dumbass of the week as it relates to first aid. We just saw an outbreak in the state of Iowa, the last Fourth of July said nah, we're going to let everybody buy all the fireworks and shit that they could possibly want because this is a good idea. Our dumbass of the week, we can call him, let's make it a her, we're going to call her Maggie.

Fred:

What'd Maggie do?

Dave:

Maggie is that person that walks up to the three inch mortar and sets it up. It always come with those cardboard pipes that you put, it has a little base, you're usually putting it in gravel or something, not a surface that will balance it anyway. You get that wick out of there. Let's just say Maggie goes ahead and lights said fuse and as she turns to get away from it, knocks it over to the point where uh oh, we just shot another family member with hot whatever the hell's in fireworks that makes them ... Phosphorous, I believe is what usually makes a lot of the light but we just shot them with something that's ultra hot and we just burnt the crap out of them. If Maggie can be walking around holding the Roman candle by her hand and it's a faulty one because, nothing against stuff that's made in China, but a lot of that stuff's made in China. Let's say that the quality standards aren't there and all of a sudden the Roman candle ruptures and again, phosphorous to the hand and we burn ourselves. How many times do you see somebody's little three year old and they're handed them those sparklers?

Fred:

Yeah.

Dave:

The old classic sparkler, I forget how many, it's over a thousand, 2000 degrees that those things burn. Now they got the ones that shoot sparklers out. Let's say that little Bobby's got his, he's still one of those little weird kids that runs around in costumes or whatever and it catches his costume on him and shrink wraps it to him.

Fred:

Catches his cat tail.

Dave:

Yeah, that's Maggie, our dumbass of the week. Let's just put it this way, my name could be Maggie because I'm pretty sure at some point in time-

Fred:

Done something pretty similar?

Dave:

I thought it was a good idea to hold onto a bottle rocket and try to shoot them out of your hand and stuff and the whole point of bottle rocket, it didn't say hand rocket, it said bottle rocket. I just get my words out of order.

Fred:

In this scenario, we always try to say what should Maggie have done differently? This is one of those, hey, don't do that shit.

Dave:

It's basically, it's backing up and having a little bit of common sense and the common sense being around fireworks a lot of times it's that liquid courage, as we started off the show with the whiskey, it's not using the whiskey to ... Or how to say, it's limiting the whiskey that's going to put a flaw in your logic and the logic being changing that bottle rocket to a hand rocket. It's getting around those but using common sense is, let's face it, there's rules and standards and regulations and everything but at the end of the day just really back it up and take in a practical approach and acting like an adult and making an informed decision.

Fred:

I guess in this scenario then, now we're here, Maggie did this, she's gotten herself burned. I guess technically, if she's got first aid supplies on hand, in a scenario, she could get out some burn gel, something like that to try and treat the injury if she was prepared for that. If somebody had a first aid kit in their truck, they probably aren't necessarily limited in the damage but if you get that burn gel on there pretty quickly, I'm assuming you're going to have a quicker healing time.

Dave:

Yes and no but let's go all the way back before that. The deal before that is let's educate ourselves or train ourselves on to properly, oh, these aren't hand rockets, these are bottle rockets. We need to put them in a bottle. Wait a second, this is what this does when we light it. Having a-

Fred:

Start thinking about that in case shit.

Dave:

Yeah, is to really back up and anytime you're trying to think about safety, you shouldn't go, well, we cut his hand off so now we're going to do this to be safe. It'd be better to look at it and go, man, we got knives all over the place. Maybe we should look at this a little bit different.

Fred:

All right. Well, time to move on to combing through Dave's email box. I guess I'll ask some couple questions here. Number one, we talked a little bit about leading edge in the past but what makes a leading edge retractable different from just a standard retractable for fall protection?

Dave:

The reason that they're different is a standard retractable is meant to, again, be mounted overhead and when basically we fall, it has a centrifugal break that then stops us. That's all in a straight line. From the top to the bottom, it's meant to be in a straight line. In a leading edge situation, the retractable itself is mounted typically a little different, sometimes it can be at the feet, it can be below the dorsal D ring, but we can have a larger amount of shock that can happen. Meaning we can fall a little bit farther distance before that break engages. Where a traditional SRL is going to lock up in under 18 inches, we may fall a couple feet on a leading edge SRL and then cause more follow resting forces. The construction of the guts is a little bit different but it's more common that there will be a shock absorber or a shock pack just like on a traditional lanyard, shock absorbing lanyard, you'll see that fat part of it where basically they stitched material that's meant to break out and absorb that energy.

Fred:

Yeah.

Dave:

Also the cable will be tested too, not typically going to see a sharp edge SRL that's not cable.

Fred:

Okay. Is that similar for when you're tying them off at your feet? It's the same principles that you're talking about.

Dave:

Pretty much the same principles.

Fred:

Stuff that's designed to tie off at your feet.

Dave:

Yeah, again, it's because you're looking at basically you're falling farther so you're creating more energy and you have to deal with that energy.

Fred:

Okay. Good. How about question number two, this particular person says they have hexane on their site. Are there direct reading hexane monitors to have on site? While we maybe don't know a ton about that specific one, how we can answer it is they have four gas monitors and then there's more exotic gas stuff. Is there a way besides just our traditional four gas monitor that we can detect for these more exotic gases?

Dave:

There's a ton of ways and some of it can get into testing tubes. There's just about, I don't know how many different types of tubes that you can get, but there's tubes that we pull air from whatever environment that we're in and it basically has something that triggers that changes colors that goes yes, there is this present in this atmosphere. There's tubes that we can do that to look for really, really weird stuff.

Fred:

Usually that stuff has to be sent off to a lab or does it react?

Dave:

Well, there's different kinds. Industrial hygienists may use a media set, so they have a pump that's pulling air across the media that almost has a filter that grabs onto it and absorbs it. Then it goes back into a lab situation and they test it to see is there a presence of this? A lot of those are typically going to be more particulates and fibers but theoretically, could be gases. Gases or vapors. There's also, we talked about tubes, a lot of the portable instruments that are out there have the ability to put some exotics that traditionally you haven't been able to use in a monitor, just your classic air monitor. The problem with just a regular air monitor is again, when we have a four gas, it's really only looking for those four things. If you don't already know what's in there, it's not going to miraculously go somebody opened something up here and now we're introducing carbon dioxide. The carbon monoxide sensor that's in a standard four gas is not all of a sudden going to alarm and go oh, I see something else that we never knew that was here.

Fred:

Okay.

Dave:

Again, a lot times when we're using a portable-

Fred:

She's got the Trolls bandages. Do you know what I mean about Trolls?

Dave:

No, not really.

Fred:

You know the Trolls probably when I was younger. The little Trolls with the long hair.

Dave:

Yeah, I guess I have.

Fred:

The pink hair and the green hair and it's really, really long. They made a movie about it.

Dave:

You always had erasers and you'd rub your hands together to get their-

Fred:

Those guys with the belly, some of them had stones in their belly button. A couple years ago they released a movie that Justin Timberlake was one of the Trolls. It's a cartoon. It's pretty popular. You probably know some of the tunes from it, just don't know that you know it.

Dave:

Probably.

Fred:

Yeah.

Dave:

I'm letting myself down. I did see the Doc McStuffins.

Fred:

Okay. That's a Disney show.

Dave:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fred:

Yeah.

Dave:

She works on animals or something like that.

Fred:

Toys. She's a toy doctor.

Dave:

Toys, yeah.

Fred:

She brings them to life. She's got her little stethoscope, she hits the little button on her stethoscope and it brings her toys to life and then she treats them. Some good values in there. It's a good one.

Dave:

Okay.

Fred:

She loves it. Hudson, my son, has Spider Man. He's into Spider Man tattoos, or not tattoos, they do like tattoos too but bandages but.

Dave:

I'll bet it's more the fact that it looks like a tattoo than it's a band aid.

Fred:

I don't know, I think it's bandage. She loves the band aid aspect of it. It's like a sticker.

Dave:

Okay.

Fred:

If she gets an owwie though, the crying stops instantly when she realizes that I'm going to get a band aid and I get to pick it out. It started getting to the point and she won't want to take that piece of shit off so we're talking the wound is healed, I'm replacing bandages, they're coming off. At daycare told us that she somehow, I don't know if she crapped herself or something like that when she was little but they gave her a bath. It was bad enough to where the daycare provider was going to give her a bath.

Dave:

Just all the way up the back kind of blow out.

Fred:

It was when she was pretty little. But her band aid came off and the daycare lady was like you would've thought she lost a diamond ring. It came off, she started screaming had to get her a different band aid. Now it's gotten to the point where she'll have a bug bite, she's like I need a band aid for this bug bite. We started putting bandages on her just to go to sleep so that she doesn't scratch a bug bite. She's an excited, she's a first aid enthusiast.

Dave:

There you go.

Fred:

I got my hands in somehow.

Dave:

Future doctor.

Fred:

Yeah, the little boy, he wants to be like sister so he's throwing the bandages on whenever he gets a chance too. She'll put a band aid on because of a cut and he'll want a band aid on just so he can look like his sister. It's pretty aggressive but anyways, task at hand, I've got a couple of Chuck Norris things that I somehow altered to be first aid compliant Chuck Norris jokes. When learning CPR, Chuck Norris brought the dummy to life. Got that. Once a cobra bit Chuck Norris' leg. After five days of excruciating pain, the cobra passed away.

Dave:

There's actually websites that are just full of these.

Fred:

Don't think I just brought these out of my brain.

Dave:

All these, you didn't differentiate these?

Fred:

No, well, some of them I altered a little bit. Chuck Norris doesn't cheat death, he wins fair and square. Chuck Norris uses hot sauce for eye wash. Fucking stepped on that one. Anyways, how about giraffes? Giraffes were created when Chuck Norris uppercut a horse. Finally, some kids piss their name in the snow, Chuck Norris pisses his name in the concrete. That's it. On that, that's it for us today. Episode five. Dave, you got anything else?

Dave:

No just daylight savings time is coming up.

Fred:

All right, first aid can be a pretty forgettable thing until you need it, so I'm glad the topic is important to our listeners to continue that conversation. Thank you so much for listening to another episode, we'll be back next week with more safety stories. If you need your fix before that, you can visit the Quad City Safety blog at quadcitysafety.com. Share your thoughts in the comments, ask me a question, ask us a question, jump into our social media conversations, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and get involved. Don't worry, there's enough Bacon the mascot to go around. Until next week, safety has no quitting time. We'll see you then.

Dave:

Take care.

 Announcer:

Thanks for listening in to Dave and Bacon's Safety Tales brought to you by Quad City Safety. Send us your questions on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter at quadcitysafety #safetytales. Or email them to Fred at quadcitysafety.com. He's the guy keeping this mess of a show in line. If you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes. It's a kickass way to show that you care about safety.