Pete was the health and safety manager at a manufacturing company. There were some highly dangerous processes undertaken in the factories in his care and Pete took his job very seriously. It was a high-profile job too because there had been a history of avoidable accidents, even fatalities, in the past and the board had made safety a priority. There were stringent targets for reducing accident rates, and statistics about accidents and near misses were displayed prominently in each factory. There was an elaborate health and safety infrastructure involving trade unions, safety committees, quality circles, monthly reports to the board, a system for sharing best practices, and so on.

On the face of it Pete was a round peg in a round hole – ideally suited to his role. A mechanical engineer by training, he was a rather earnest fellow who tended to take life seriously. He was keen on measurement and loved analysing data and producing graphs and pie charts (much in evidence in all the factories). He was also expert at drafting unambiguous rules and guidelines and was a great believer in making good practices compulsory rather than voluntary. He often said, ‘People do what’s checked, not what you’d expect.’

There was, however, a strange irony about Pete in his role as a champion for safety; he was accident-prone! Mishaps and accidents seemed to find their way to him in the same way that a moth is attracted to a bright light.

He would happily joke about having more than his fair share of accidents. When he had scrapes in his car, typically he would run into the back of a police patrol car. When he flew in an aircraft there would often be an unexpected technical hitch. Once an engine caught fire one hour out from Heathrow and fuel had to be jettisoned before the plane could return to the airport with numerous fire engines in attendance. When he gave a presentation, the laptop would become disobedient and the table upon which he sat (to give an impression of nonchalance) would collapse without warning. When he cut his hedge, the ladder would slip and he’d need stitches in the hand that had inadvertently touched the blades of his electric hedge trimmer. He actually fell off his roof once while clearing leaves from the guttering and broke his leg in three places.

He also had a track record for, not accidents as such, but absurd mishaps in hotels (the factories he had to visit were all over the country and this often necessitated overnight stays). He was a guest staying at a hotel when the reception area was demolished by a runaway lorry. Another hotel was flooded when torrential rain caused a stream to divert through the dining room. Yet another was attacked by thieves who put all the expensive cars in the hotel car park up on breeze-blocks and made off with the alloy wheels.

Once Pete got up in the night for a pee, and mistook the door to his room for the door to the toilet. It closed behind him and left him standing stark naked in the corridor with the key inside (he was eventually rescued by an astonished night porter). On another occasion he was dozing in the bath when a large middle-aged woman accosted him, insisting he was in her bath.

One day Pete paid a visit to a newly acquired factory to chair a safety meeting with the top management team. He hadn’t been to this particular factory before and was keen to make a good impression and to put safety issues firmly on the conscious agenda. The meeting was held in a plush boardroom that harked back to Victorian days when the factory had been owned by a wealthy family. Before the meeting Pete had used the management toilet a few doors along the corridor – a splendid place with a stained glass window, a magnificent water closet with a large wooden seat complete with the original brass hinges, and decorative Edwardian tiles from floor to ceiling. Pete subscribed to the Duke of Wellington’s dictum that wise men pee when they can and fools when they must. This was an opportunist ‘can’ pee rather than a ‘must’ pee and, as Pete rinsed his hands in the generous wash-basin, he relished the finer points of his surroundings.

After a successful but protracted meeting, during which coffee and water had been plentiful, Pete needed a ‘must’ pee. As he walked down the corridor with the general manager of the factory and other members of the top team, he asked to be excused and dived through the door to his left only to find himself in a cupboard full of brooms, mops, buckets and vacuum cleaners.

Realising his mistake, Pete, paused momentarily to reflect on his predicament. Would it be more dignified to emerge from the cupboard immediately or might it be best to linger, hoping that his colleagues would have walked on and not noticed that he had rushed into a cupboard instead of the toilet next door? He decided that the former would be marginally less damaging to his reputation and reached for the door-handle (a heavily patterned brass original) which turned aimlessly without opening the door. He tried again, but it was clear that the spindle inside the handle had become disconnected.

While he was wondering what to do next, the door opened from the outside. The entire management team was standing in the corridor doubled up with laughter.