My new safety rule is to kill any spider that looks remotely like a brown recluse.
One of my co-workers on fire/rescue in So. FL was cleaning out a utility shed, and he met-up with a brown recluse. He got bit on a finger, and the bite dissolved some of the tissue, when he was finished, the tissue was just skin over a bone down to the first knuckle. He was a gifted acoustic and electric guitar player and he always cursed that brown recluse whenever he played guitar, after that.
We had a guy in our squadron get a recluse bite on his thigh and they had to take out a chunk of muscle the size of a racket ball.
Besides my friend's brown recluse bite, I saw a few of them on fire-rescue. The abscessed tissue always made a crater with blackened skin and purulence.
My biggest one that I've added in the last few years is always wear shoes in the shop. I'm a big time 'barefoot' person. I really don't like wearing shoes. But I have a pair by the backdoor that I slip on anytime I go out to the shop now.
My motorcycle-ridin' buddy who is a retired HVAC master-license-holder, always wears a thin pair of flip-flops. I've asked him for help in moving my bikes, and had him show-up in those. I suggested that he wear a pair of sneakers, at least, but he doesn't. I hope he doesn't get hurt because of those stupid flip-flops.
No drinking on the roof.
One of the firefighters who worked with me was a functional alcoholic. He had been a driver-engineer, but was demoted because of it. he had bad hygiene besides, most-easily defined by a mouth half-full of rotten brown teeth. The others had fallen out. He finally was terminated.
One morning, I was in our jurisdiction, off-duty, and I passed a roofing company truck, filled with supplies, and atop the supplies, was my former co-worker, hooting and hollering, and drinking some cheap bottled beer. I don't think he noticed me, but I wondered why anyone would accept the risk and the liability for hiring someone who drank on the job, roofing. When I saw him it was probably 10 a.m.
