The barista at the coffee shop was wearing sharps-resistant gloves while handling a clear garbage bag that she had already scanned for sharps. She held it away from her body. Then the bag swung and bumped against the wall and the needle, of unknown origin, went into her unprotected knee.

Once there was a boss who had a plan for fooling safety inspectors. One of his former employees told me about it. He was given a broom and told to pretend he was cleaning up if any safety inspectors drove up to their construction site.

A friend told me about a crane that dropped its big, heavy hook on a construction site in downtown Vancouver. The impact shook the ground and sent up such a plume of dust that he thought the load had dropped.

Alden Andrews is a 35-year-old father who works for the City of Vancouver’s Waterworks Department. He and his baby son Alistair, 10 months, were photographed for the Slow Down campaign aimed at raising awareness of driving safely around traffic control people.

Congratulations to Francesca Alfano, a teacher/librarian in Hamilton, who has won a copy of Forget Me Not: Canadian Stories of Workplace Tragedy from the Families’ Perspective. Publisher Threads of Life sent me two copies of their new book. They asked me to keep one copy and give one away (hence the contest).

I saw an amazing video about a man who survived by staying calm. His bulldozer was buried in a coal pile, so he took out his self-rescue kit, adjusted the ventilation in the cab, and then waited calmly, thinking of his family.

A worker on a steep roof slipped and shot himself in the leg with a nail-gun. A softened shingle had torn loose under his body weight and, as he slipped, he shot himself just above the left knee with his air nailer – lodging it firmly into the bone.

Greg Shoesmith was only 22 when he died at work, operating a logging skidder near Barriere, BC. His story is featured in a new book called: Forget Me Not – Canadian Stories of Workplace Tragedy from the Families’ Perspective.

My friend Dave Dawson worked as a line cook at a busy Ottawa restaurant in the late 80s. He and his coworkers ran the kitchen with little to no supervision. One night a cook asked Dave to do something that seemed pretty sketchy.

The image kept replaying in his mind. My friend Reid accidentally chopped off his pinky finger with a table saw when he was cutting window trim at work. The flashbacks were really disturbing for a couple of weeks, particularly when he was going to sleep.