Haven't weighed in on the oil spill yet. It's far too depressing to dwell on from more than a few minutes at a time. I'm not sure how the journalists assigned to that beat keep plugging, day after day, filing stories about this not-even-yet-contained disaster.
It takes a lot of things going wrong at once for a spill of this magnitude to occur, but one factor has stuck with me for a day now, and I can't shake it. The oil rig has a siren designed to alert the crew when something really, really, lots of really very bad is happening.
That siren wasn't on. That's what Mike Williams, the rig’s chief electronics technician, told investigators. It was set to "inhibited," seemingly in order to cut down on false alarms disturbing the crew in the middle of the night.
I am in favor of sleep. Those of you who know me / live with me / have lived with me / can hear me snoring down the street, you all know this. I'm thinking of turning pro with the whole sleeping thing, if I don't end up blogging my way to superstardom and superwealthdom.
(As I'm sure you know, competitive EATING is a sport. They show it on ESPN and everything. This guy's an international icon. We can make competitive sleeping a reality. Join me. Let's live the dream. So to speak. PBS would televise it, for sure.)
So don't label me anti-sleep. But what reasoning led to this decision?
Supervisor: "My people need to be alert. They need deep, uninterrupted sleep to be productive. They can't have loud sirens going off willy-nilly at 3:30 a.m."
Corporate Stooge: "Good point. We like productivity. What do you suggest?"
Supervisor: "We could turn down certain warning systems."
Corporate Stooge: "Just incapacitate the superfluous ones. And keep them on, just muted."
Supervisor, later on, to crew: "You heard the man. Everything off at night. Ecological disasters, from now on, are permitted to happen in daytime hours only. Please inform Mother Nature, and retroactively pass the information on to the people who made this contraption decades ago."
Eleven people died in that explosion last April. A dumb siren might not have ended up saving their lives, and it might not even have had an impact on this whole catastrophe. (Which we ALL know is the direct fault of one Barack Hussein Obama, asleep at the switch again, busy using NASA for Muslim outreach and fostering war between Venezuela and Colombia instead of commuting to the Gulf of Mexico to run oil well shifts and conduct routing maintenance.)
But it's tempting to wonder how things would have shaken out differently if instead of comfort, safety had been the driving force behind safety procedures on the Deepwater Horizon.
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