The Flying Beefburger - a Cautionary Tale

Once upon a time in a supermarket in southern England, there were two workmates and colleagues. Let us call them Pete and Dud. Pete and Dud worked in the same section, and they were good mates.

One day, as a bit of a larf, Pete threw a beefburger at Dud (this was before we knew about Mad Cow Disease, so clearly Pete was unaware of the risks). Dud, caught unawares, failed to catch the flying disk of protein, and it hit him above the eye.

This was worse news for Dud than you might imagine. For Pete and Dud worked in the frozen foods department. The frozen burger cut Dud's head open, and Dud subsequently spent a while in Luton's finest Casualty department.

Now the thing is, nobody actually has a rule in their terms and conditions stipulating that you can't throw beefburgers at people. Or, at least, none that I know of. Maybe in the public sector, where crack teams of HR people are employed to labour long into the afternoon drawing up Terms & Conditions, there might be some such rule. Or, I suppose, in a burger manufactory, where such incidents are potentially more common, you might see a sign on the wall saying "Flying Beefburgers Can Give You A Nasty Cut - Don't Throw Them". With, no doubt, an amusing image of a flying burger.

But our supermarkets sell thousands of products. They can't have a separate rule for every product. The contract would be hundreds of pages long. So, apart from a few obvious rules such as don't turn up to work under the influence, and some stuff about not using machinery without training and not sitting too close to the bandsaw, they stick to one general one along the lines of "no pratting about". Throwing a frozen beefburger at someone definitely fits under the heading of pratting about. So Pete had, by ignoring the rules, put someone in hospital. A Disciplinary hovered before him.

Knowing what the end might be for his mate, Dud wavered long and hard before writing the description of his accident in the accident book. In the end it read "I hit my head on the racking" - which is not a disciplinary offence. So Dud had an afternoon off work, Pete kept his job, and within a week they were back to throwing frozen comestibles at each other just like old times. With Dud suffering no more than light scarring, and a dull ache above the eyebrow when the wind was in the east.

Now my point is this. Throwing a beefburger could have got Pete the sack. While hitting your head on the racking is a legitimate business activity. As a result I suspect that the actual rate of beefburger throwing, and the resultant level of injury, is woefully under-reported.

Somewhere, as I write, someone is considering padding all the racking in frozen food departments and giving warehousemen spatial awareness training. Whereas what they should be doing is training them to catch. Although, if councils ran supermarkets, some jobsworth would solve the problem by banning frozen food. But if we accepted people as they are - fallible, sinful and stupid - and mitigated the punishment if they owned up - forgave them if they repented - the world would be a more sensible place. People could learn from their mistakes. And fewer people would need stitches in their foreheads.