My cardiologist recently asked me if I thought I was in good health and I replied that I thought I was. Then he went through a checklist of my past health issues which included a bolt in my foot, a partial hip replacement, a broken shoulder, a popped bicep muscle, broken fingers, two hernias and various other contusions. Several of these mishaps involved a ladder and almost all of them required a general anesthetic.
“What can I say?” I shrugged. “I have a farm.” At the beginning of the pandemic my younger son decided not to renew his contract with the Canadian military and, much to his mother’s delight, he came home. He didn’t think there was much chance of getting posted anywhere interesting and he wanted to try his hand at some sort of small business. His mother was confident that he had made the safer choice.
Just before his discharge, Matt’s superiors tried to talk him out of leaving by offering him a leadership course, but he wasn’t keen on the idea of becoming an officer. For six years, he had listened to his sergeants refer to the people up the chain of command as “The Good Idea Fairies” and he didn’t want to join that club. Matt would have made an excellent officer because he grew up on a farm and got used to figuring things out by himself at a very early age. Farm life encourages problem-solving and resourcefulness, two characteristics that stand you in good stead wherever life takes you. But it also can turn you into a Good Idea Fairy if you’re not careful. This is the reason why a lot of farmers are missing fingers or have a distinctive limp.
I remember a kindergarten teacher telling us that Matt was a great problem solver. At the time, she was watching him pile up boxes to get to a high shelf that held a can of paint he wanted. “He’s very creative,” she said admiringly.
Dr. Sam Pelzman, an economist at the University of Chicago, who studied motor accident statistics after the introduction of seatbelts in the 1970s, found that measures to address the consequences of bad driving only encouraged more bad driving. The Pelzman Effect was coined to describe how safety measures often failed to make people adjust their personal comfort level for risky behavior. A driver who finds that anti-lock brakes will stop his car in half the time and distance he needs for conventional brakes will now drive twice as fast and follow the vehicle in front of him twice as close. He is no safer than he was to start with. It is a known fact in sky-diving … the safer the gear, the more chances skydivers will take, in order to keep the fatality rate constant.
This makes farm safety people tear their hair out. They go to a lot of effort drawing pictures on lawn mowers and farm machinery …stick figures doing really stupid things like putting their hand under the mower deck to see if the blades are spinning. Do the pictures help? The answer is, and always will be, ‘Not one little bit’. In fact, some of the pictures look like fun. Who knew you could play catch with your front-end loader?
Behavior that appears idiotic to most of us is hard-wired into the young brains. How else did we discover that the world wasn’t flat? How else did we learn to fly or drink cow’s milk or eat mushrooms?
I have captured this principle in a mathematical equation:
Safety Choices = Effort Saved x Bragging Rights : Probability of Public Humiliation.
I see Matt go by on the riding mower. He leans down to grab a twig off the lawn, like a gaucho cowboy, one toe in the steering wheel and one hand on the seat to keep the safety shut-off switch from activating. In that brief moment, you can see that the history of human technical progress is really nothing more than a series of bar bets. “If I can do that, then why can’t I do this? Here, hold my beer.”
His mother says, “Where do you think he learned this? He’s been watching you for the last 25 years.” She shook her head impatiently. “I suppose he’ll be fine... if he’s allowed to live.”