Safety Shmafety

We islanders and our 'laid back' attitude is not always translated into shirking work under the coconut trees like my road works crew, who incidentally are now filling buckets of water from the yard pipe to wash their cars in the driveway. No, our guys can work hard when they're ready and in this hot as all ass sun they put the pastey white boys from the North to shame. But laid back is laid back-it's part of 'WE' culture and it has to eventually creep out somewhere. When it comes to manual labour, the laidbackity almost always seems to be limin' in the safety department. Take Michelle's house. They've gotten to the roof stage, all easter weekend pushing work tirelessly, hanging from rafters, tightwalking the beams, pulling up posts to be hammered and sawed, with no shoes, no helmets, no ropes, no lunch break, a gallon of rum punch and a chief carpenter with a drinking problem. One need not be a literary scholar to follow the plot of this story. After hours of hot sun on an uncovered head and a hungry stomach fed nothing but fermented sugar cane we all know what happened. In fact we foresaw the climax of this story the minute the rum left the fridge before the drinking began. The drunkin carpenter's eyes finally closed and he plumeted off the scaffolding missing to iron rods by inches and landed on the concrete floor. Thankfully, what they say about drunks is true. He got up, said he was just tired and went home to sleep. By the next morning he was back on the scaffolding, complaining that sprite won't cut the thirst and sneaking swigs of the left back punch he'd managed to stash behind some boards after the fall. All is well.