PERSONAL SAFETY MANAGEMENT

Archive for the ‘Personal Risk Management’ Category

Lately I have been busy with other matters, all the while the world has kept turning and one disaster after another has struck. I wonder how many people in Tsunami struck parts of Japan had an Emergency Food Supply they could rely on for the days, sometimes weeks after the disaster strikes? Living where I do the worst we have suffered this year so far has been a five hour blackout one Saturday night. Fortunately we had candles and a BBQ and made it fun for the kids. If it had gone on for 24 hours though we would have lost food in the freezer if I hadn’t been able to get the camping fridge going on the LPG bottle. Luckily frozen will stay that way for some time and chest freezers more so than uprights, so long as you don’t keep opening the door.

I have been writing eBooks for a US client covering finance, credit, mortgages and investments for Australia and it has been an education. Doing the research and writing the books has made me a fan of calculators like the Mortgage Payment Calculator and another one that calculates compound interest, how much you need to save to reach a set target and so on. These are important tools for your financial safety management. We often think of natural disasters and wild animals, car wrecks and robbery, but who considers the risk and harm of losing your job?

It pays to be financially safe as well as in all the other ways. I’ll write more on that soon.

Ever since the movie ‘The Bucket List’ written by Justin Zackham and starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson hit the screens the phrase ‘bucket list’ has been tossed around. It has made it into the lexicon, pretty much like ’24/7′ and to have ‘closure’. One of the big ticks on a lot of bucket lists is to climb Mount Everest. In fact, with a spare fifty grand and two months of your life, you too can add to the growing number of ‘Summiteers’ or frozen bodies the tick has created in the past couple of decades.

I always wonder how much a claim to something like this is done for one’s own personal development, to prove to yourself you can push your boundaries… and how much is about showing off. Don’t get me wrong, showing off is a genuine human trait we have all shared a sometime in our lives and not restricted to toddlers or teens. However one should consider the risks involved and despite a 13 year old and a 76 year old on the list of Summiteers, getting to the top is still no walk in the park. Is it worth it? Only those who try and fail or succeed can answer that question. The rest of us can only answer the question ‘is it worth it for me?’

Not for this little black duck. Even if I had the money and time I don’t have the health and fitness anymore. Life deals you your hand and shuffles the cards now and then and while once you were young and fit and healthy you can easily become older, overweight and ill. You have to be honest and to an extent accept your situation and limitations while always looking to stretch those boundaries and achieve more. You can do this sensibly or stupidly. For me, even thinking of Everest is stupid. Sensible is perhaps something a little more within my capabilities and experience, like sailing around Cape Horn.

I’m 50 next year and I plan to round the Horn as one of the events on my own ‘bucket list’. I call it the ‘Faking It At Fifty’ list because I don’t feel any pressure to get it ticked up before I kick the bucket, rather just within the year I turn 50 and the year I am 50. So I have 24 months to work with. If I don’t get it all done in time… I’ll add it to my ‘From 50 to 60′ List. There’s nothing like being a little flexible when it comes to ticking off things on lists… or life itself for that matter. Few things we ever contemplate, attempt or achieve are truly, ‘life or death’ after all.

There is an old saying that is probably not PC enough for today but it runs along the lines that ‘the opera ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings’. The same is true for life and life threatening situations. It ‘ain’t over ’til it’s over’! A man drove himself to hospital the other night after receiving several stab wounds. No doubt he made the conscious decision he wasn’t going to die. He wasn’t giving in.

Very often that is all it takes, that conscious decision to fight, to survive. Not to just roll over and die. Sadly, in Afghanistan we lost our 17th Digger last night. Another IED (Improvised Explosive Device) or ‘roadside bomb’. As a former Engineer I was trained to find and neutralize IEDs and even in training the tension was considerable. One can only imagine what our young men and women face every day serving their country in that long running war. And they are young.

This last casualty was just 23. We often disparage the younger generation, it was ever so when I was his age and it has ever been so going back to the days of the Ancient Greeks. The reality though is that these are our best, the cream of their generation and they are always the ones to pay the price, as their great grandfathers did in World War 1, their grandfathers in World War 2 and Korea, Malaya and their fathers in Borneo, Vietnam and the Cold War. I include the Cold War because while casualties were mainly in training accidents, we did lose service members who will never be remembered by the issue of a medal, but they are with us all the same.

These soldiers are a different generation with their iPods and email and You Tube helmet cams but their mission is no less lethal, nor is their professionalism any the more wanting. Casualties are a fact of war. We should be grateful we have lost so few for the large amount of good they have done for the people of Afghanistan and not wring our hands when another falls, no matter how deeply we feel their loss.

You see the job’s not done and those soldiers would be the first to demand they be left to finish it. They are not losing. They are positive, upbeat and their morale is high. They are professional soldiers and they are aware of the risks, they accept the possible consequences, they only ask to be left to get on with the job and not be tried by media for every squeeze of the trigger.

They have esprit de corps, instilled during the training process as they are molded into a fighting force that looks after each other. They know the love of men at arms for one another, a bond that is hard to replicate outside the military and even harder for civilians to understand if they have never had the privilege of serving with such men. They aren’t afraid of the Taliban, they’ve got the means to hurt the enemy, they just need the political and public will to let them get on with the job. They’ll do the rest. They have the kit, the training and the will to win. And that is what it is all about, either in Afghanistan or Australia, the will to win. Never give up, never give in. Not until the fat lady sings and we pay the fat lady, not them.

Recently a South African woman ended up in hospital when her parachute failed to open correctly. She claims she saw the three previous jumpers all have problems with their chutes and refused to jump but… her instructor pushed her out of the plane!

Of course he denies this and says while they did circle a couple of times she jumped of her own volition. Someone is right and someone is wrong and my money would be on the woman unless she is trying to get a court settlement from the skydiving company.

This is a good example of paying attention! If you do see other people having problems with their chutes then by all means don’t follow them. I can;t see why an instructor would force someone to jump if he knew there were problems with the chutes but perhaps after seeing hundreds of new jumpers he was somewhat immune to the normal range of reactions and took her as someone who just needed a little help to achieve their goal.

Read the story for yourself here and tell me what you think.

Perry Gamsby

Enjoy the blog posts here. They are an eclectic collection of opinions, events, experiences and sadly a few tragedies. All are true and have happened to someone, somewhere. Just about all of them were avoidable.  Visit every page on the site but come back here regularly as there will always be something new to read and hopefully learn from. Remember, few things in life are ever actually fatal.