So I still haven't managed to work existential angst into a field safety form yet, but I've recently encountered a new avenue for expressing myself through interpretive safety form-ing and I'm really pumped for it: a client company wants field staff to assign themselves a fatigue rating of 1-7 each day, with 7 being extreme fatigue and 1 being so foreign to me at this point that I'm not entirely sure what it might mean... Anyway, the tricky thing is that if you rate yourself as anything 3 or over you're to stop work immediately and call your project manager to discuss how to mitigate your compromised condition. Naturally, this means no one can ever actually disclose their true fatigue rating because they're all too fatigued to fuck around with nonsense like that, and it is in this procedural grey area where I feel an exciting opportunity for creative self-expression lies.
My proposed new fatigue scale lies outside numbers, and indeed outside of logic. One simply senses how fatigued they are, and expresses that sense through brief, evocative tales. The scale is thus deeply personal, unique to each individual, and cannot be interpreted in a way that would require additional paperwork. Wins all around!
I invite you to join me in my own non-numerical exploration of field-season fatigue:
- gosh, why can't I remember the words for anything today?
- closed cattle gate with self on wrong side
- huh, that's not a cool new sedge at all, it's just a beetle standing on a piece of grass
- sat on an ant hill
- NO. CLUE. where I was when I woke up this morning
- drooled lightly on fieldsheet during microsleep
If there happen to be seven levels here it is purely coincidental - like how the 1-4 on your child's report card definitely doesn't translate into actual grades at all, wink wink. And I won't go confessing that I'm running at a solid 4 or 5 these days because that just wouldn't be safe, winkwinkwink, but I can tell you that I had to get Emergency Naked on the prairie at one point this week because my clothes suddenly got REALLY full of ants for some reason. Oh, and I was staying in Consort. It only took me like five minutes, tops, to figure that out every morning.
In unrelated news, I've got a bunch of plants here that I have to look up the names of, so I guess I'll sign off and get back to work. G'night, and godspeed!
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