I started writing this article during the 2022 World Cup. It was going to discuss various anecdotal accounts which I have heard over the years of chemical process plant accidents which had been caused by operators watching the football when they should have been watching the plant, and/or by unsafe practices such as propping open fire/blast doors on rigs to get a better TV signal to watch the footy.
But of course no-one is watching the match on a black and white 12” screen with rabbit ears nowadays. They are watching it on the computer which was supposed to be dedicated to the SCADA system, or on their mobile device. That’s when they aren’t using those devices to look at social media, or porn, or to play computer games, etc.
Trying to prise people’s hands away from their mobile attention magnet devices at the work gate nowadays is harder than it used to be to get them to give up their cigarettes and matches, back when people were addicted to nicotine instead of apps. It might be possible to achieve it to a large degree at a GMP or top-tier COMAH site, though anecdotes suggest some people still manage to take their own devices into such facilities or get issued with flameproof mobile devices.
Now, some safety people would argue that sending messages to mobile devices is a better way to communicate an alarm than using the traditional PA system, thus suggesting that people should be allowed to carry their own devices for this reason. However, the idea that personal devices reliant on WiFi or 4G signals are a more reliable way to communicate an emergency than a really loud siren is clearly nonsense. The truth of the matter is more likely, I think, that people would like to keep hold of their own devices, as they can install and run any app they like on them.
Not that people do not view illicit material or install unauthorized programs content on work devices. One of the ways in which malware such as Stuxnet can find its way onto supposedly safe computers is by leaving expensive USB drives in the employee car park. Workers will innocently plug them in to their work computer to see what’s on them, and it’s game over.
Plant operators are being paid to pay attention. This mostly involves maintaining attention when nothing is happening, but that is no excuse for playing Red Dead Redemption when you were supposed to be keeping an eye on the reactor temperature. If you cannot maintain attention in these circumstances, you are unsuited to this kind of work.
But of course, clever people have spent time and money making you really want to play their games, watch their sports events, and interact with social media. Allowing you access to such addictive activities as an alternative to doing your job properly is arguably expecting too much. In my view, no-one should get to have their personal devices in any workplace where attention must be paid – which is pretty much all of them.
I used to do a lot of training in the Middle East. One of the reasons why I stopped is that supposedly professional engineers can no longer pay attention to a presenter, even if you involve them in frequent activities, as I do. Anyone attempting to deliver an old school “Death by PowerPoint” might as well have recorded it in advance and set it going. No-one is watching, and nothing will be learned.
I experienced a similar thing when I taught in universities, and I enforced the (deeply unpopular) strict campus -wide ban on mobile devices in my own lectures. Once, I attempted an idea from teaching literature where you got students to use mobile devices as part of an exercise. I never did it again. Once those phones were out, they stayed out. They were all on Facebook or watching “vines” (2015’s approximate equivalent of TikTok) for the rest of the session.
My conclusion from all this: work is never going to compete with fun, and it shouldn’t have to try, especially not in a safety-critical environment.
