THE GOAL IS ZERO

Ted Haggard ministered to a 14,000 strong conservative Christian congregation while smoking crystal meth and having sex with male prostitutes in his free time. Alan Page played All-Pro defensive tackle for the Vikings while attending law school at the University of Minnesota, eventually rising to become a state supreme court justice. And KC, sorcerer of death’s construction, gets paid in large part to make sure that other people do not get themselves into industrial accidents.

KC works in a manufacturing plant that is full of massive machines that would like nothing more than to crush the bones and sever the limbs of their operators. Part of his role there is to make sure that this does not happen –his salary is tied in part to the plant’s accident rate. His laptop computer has stickers bearing pithy slogans like “Make Safety First – And Make it Last”, “Be Safe, Not Sorry”, and “THE GOAL IS ZERO.” He teaches seminars on safety. When I was a kid, he would receive calls in the middle of the night to go to the emergency room when his subordinates would forget their KC lesson and lose a digit or slip a disc. The place where he works advertises (or at least used to) the number of accident-free days on its front sign.

So professionally, my father is a safety-first, by the book, measure-twice-cut-once Miley Cyrus. But when he comes home, he transforms into the safety version of Hannah Montana, dangling his long blond hair over the exposed gears of an industrial conveyor belt.

The same man who beeps his car horn twice before backing up in his plant’s empty parking lot (standard procedure) painted a hard-to-reach piece of drywall by standing on a piece of particle board that he placed across an eight foot precipice. The same man who demands that his wife hold the railing while descending an average staircase at an office building (that our protocol) also thinks it is perfectly appropriate to put his life in the hands of a strand of half-centimeter rope tied to a tree branch while reshingling the peak of his rooftop. My sister and I were about four and six years old when he undertook that particular project. My mom took us to the neighbor’s pool so that we would not bear the scars that come with hearing the crunch of your father’s bones as he slams into the front yard after a thirty foot drop. But now that I think about it, we would have still heard him scream because the neighbor only lived across the street.
Another time, he was trimming some pretty large tree limbs in the backyard and he was concerned about hitting the house, the garden, or the fence when the limbs dropped to the ground. So he again developed an ingenious rope-based solution. He deputized me, his twelve year old son, to tie a rope around the tree limb. As a limb started to fall, my job was to pull it away from the areas where it would cause the most property damage. In other words, pull the gigantic limb, which outweighs me about eight to one, towards my slow-footed, squishy self as the limb tumbles to the ground. I am sure he would have promoted one of his subordinates for devising such a well-reasoned, belt-and-suspenders type of approach to lawn maintenance.

Later the same summer, my friends and I bought bottle rockets and took to our cul de sac to shoot them at each other. While this might be considered unwise, we were only twelve years old, and after all, I share some of my father’s pyromaniacal DNA . We were using citronella candles for ignition, and at some point one of the candles went out. We had a few matches, but the match book had been stepped on or something, so we had nothing on which to strike the match. I presented this problem to my dad. I think that many 42 year old fathers would say something like, “sorry ol’ Sport, looks like you’ll have stop shooting those explosive devices into each other’s faces.” Instead, KC rubbed his chin, fired up the stove top, and lit the match on the glowing red griddle. KC did not do this to try and be the “cool dad.” Rather, I think he disliked one of the neighborhood kids, and he figured that extending this bottle rocket war increased the chances that the kid would experience some pain and stop coming around. Measure twice!

KC spends a good part of his day ensuring that his plant’s machinery will not fail and cause injuries to his colleagues. And yet he drives a Ford Bronco whose chassis is so corroded that you do not have to be Miss Cleo to see how things are going to end. KC will be driving down the highway, he will hit a solid bump, and his floorboards will splinter. It will make for one hell of an obituary: “Industrial Safety Expert Killed When He Is Run Over by the Very Car that He Is Driving.”