So I just saw Inception last night.  I won’t give you a plot summery or boring essay but the basic premise of the movie was stealing ideas from the minds of powerful men during their sleep to manipulate them in reality.  Then, inversely, but described in the movie as much more difficult, to plant ideas in their minds while they slept so that when they awoke the idea would take hold.  Now there’s a thought! (No pun intended.)  Just think of the incredible things you could do with the power of giving someone an idea subconsciously.  After living with my girlfriend, Nikki, now for about 3 months, I can tell you the first thing that came into my head was to implant the idea that Travis doesn’t need to clean nearly as often as she feels necessary.  We would wake up (in separate rooms if my grandmother is reading this) and she would look at me and say, “You know, I feel like you clean more than you need to.”  I would whole-heartedly agree and life would continue with a certain bliss that only comes from domestic sloth.

Though I doubt I would stop there.  Next I would insert the notion that our 90lb black lab doesn’t always need to sleep with us, and after that, well…..this is a professional blog used for business purposes so I won’t go into the further depths at which I would go to make a more pleasing, albeit selfish, cohabitation.  It certainly would be a very fun tool- or so I thought, until I realized that this incredible power could also be used AGAINST me.  I’d wake up with the strange desire to fold clothes, do dishes, wash her car, talk about my feelings, rent romantic comedies, rub her feet, shave regularly, run daily, or worse yet learn to love country music!  It was this chilling, all-too-sobering thought that made me re-evaluate my thoughts on “inception.”  It was shortly after I had stopped twitching at the notion of me listening to country music while wearing boots, saying “y’all” and finally understanding just what the hell a “honky-tonk badonkadonk” is that I began to think of the good I could do with our industry.

Maybe I’d start with something small like not standing hopper grates, I thought.  A simple concept, yet time again ignored despite the serious ramifications.  If you dreamt you fell into a hopper grate and everything below your waist was grinded enough to reflect abstract art, is that enough to keep you from doing it?  If you saw not only what would happen that day, but also the ensuing days of torturous physical therapy, the adjustment of life in a wheelchair, and sexual dysfunction, would it affect you enough to think twice about standing on that grate?  Or what if you dreamt you hit a power line and had to watch from your truck co-workers becoming charged with electrical current, killing them in front of your eyes?  But the dream wouldn’t just stop there, it would continue to you having to tell the families of those killed by your absentminded mistake, the months of stress as you battle a lawsuit aimed to ruin your life, and the years of agony and regret for just a moment’s disregard of safety.

We’ve all had dreams were we woke up and it took us a long time to realize what we just experienced wasn’t real. Sometimes it leaves such a lasting image in our minds that we remember it throughout the day, and sometimes it last longer.  I know each of us still have a few dreams that have stayed in the back of our minds for years.  Sadly, though I can’t place these ideas in your mind for you to vividly dream of them, thus scaring you to strive for perfection when it comes to safety.   I can only use this blog, seminars, pamphlets, safety bulletins, and in the end it’s on you.  I urge you to look beyond the immediate consequences of your actions, look to just how long lives can be destroyed with just one accident, and ask yourself is a few moments of mild convenience and lazy work worth a lifetime of regret?

Still, keepin’ the rubber side down,

Travis

NOTE:  Honey if you read this I was only kidding about the cleaning, I LOVE HELPING!