Pleased to meet you. Hope you (don’t) guess my name.

Hi.  Hello.  Salaam.  Здравейте. Welcome to what hopefully is about to become my little blog about all things risky.  Come in, sit down, and maybe be ready to let go of a few long held ideas that have taken root in your imagination.

First of all you will excuse me if I am little coy about introducing myself.  I don’t have any dramatic reasons for not telling you who I am.  I’m not a foreign spy or an international drug lord nor a propogandist transmitting subversive messages out from a pirate radio ship out at sea.  I work in the field of occupational safety & health.  What could be less glamorous than that?  I do however work for a very large organisation that might not always want to be associated with my own personal views about the wonderful world of risk and that for now is probably a very good reason to remain quietly anonymous.  Aside from my personal identity I can tell you a bit more about myself.

First of all I’m English and live in the UK as you may grasp from various cultural references that crop up as I post.  I work as an advisor to a large international organisation regarding safety and health risk management issues.  In terms of my professional credentials I’m a Chartered Member of the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) and also a Chartered Environmental Health Practitioner (EHP) registered with the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH).  For quite a few years I worked in a number of British local government departments where I enforced forced environmental, food safety, and occupational safety law upon an often unsuspecting crowd of small, medium, and large business enterprises. When I remember those days I shudder thinking of those poor managers who I visited with no prior appointment.  How important I felt as I shoved my personal interpretation of rules and regulations down their throats.  Perhaps this is some way of dealing with my professional guilt.  Hey World, I’ve changed!

Nowadays I spend my time on the other side of the regulatory fence dealing with occupational risks for around 5000 employees and an insane number of other voluntary workers spread around the UK and the Republic of Ireland.  I’ve given in my sheriff’s badge and walked off into the sunset to try to turn around the culture of this big organisation.  I didn’t realise when I set out that essentially I’d be trying to market common sense, nor how much blood would be spilt trying to do it.  But you see, common sense isn’t all that common these days…