STORY SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!
What's to Come and the Wonderful Futility of Safety in Your Job
After some much-needed R&R—and while incubating over at MUN’s Center for Social Enterprise—I awoke to a dream about Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors.
Apparently my subconscious now moonlights as a literary critic when I'm not feeding the bureaucratic machinery that is government—or, by extension, university. But don’t let a bit of cynicism put you off!
Here's the revelation that hit me like a poorly-filled incident report: workplaces aren’t broken — they’re working exactly as designed. The chaos isn't a bug, it's a feature. We've built systems so perfectly dysfunctional that they'd make the Bard weep with artistic envy.
So, I defer to literature:
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!" While Shakespeare was mocking love-drunk fools. He clearly never met a safety committee.
What’s Your Frontline?
By “frontline,” I don’t mean some noble battlefield metaphor.
It’s the psychosocial crime scene where critical thinking gets assassinated by policy manuals, and common sense outranks science.
It’s where:
Safety meetings represent the most common workplace hazard
Forms breed faster than rabbits on Adderall
“Best practices” are neither best nor practiced
Folks closest to the problem have the least power to fix it
Success is invisible, but failure gets a PowerPoint presentation
You’re not frontline workers — you’re crisis archaeologists, digging through bureaucratic layers to uncover the actual human underneath. Congratulations!
As safety-critical personnel, you’ve chosen a profession where doing your job well means no one notices, and doing it poorly might earn you a promotion or an even deeper seat in to the bureaucracy.
The ‘Frontline’ is where or when organizational intent becomes action, whether through direct public engagement or instant operational support (behind the scenes).
It refers to:
anyone whose work directly affects the public or service outcomes in real time, whether through face-to-face contact or immediate operational advice
the point where an organization meets the outside world—through customer contact or roles that shape human service provision at any given moment
roles defined by immediacy and impact—spanning both direct service and critical support functions that determine real-time outcomes
What's Coming and Why You Need It
Starting Friday, we’re serving up weekly doses of occupational therapy—thinly disguised as a peer-to-peer comedy-of-errors.
Think storytelling meets HR, but funnier, and with way better incident reporting.
We’re kicking things off with “correctional” vignettes, partly because it’s my specialty, and partly because if you can make fun of prison bureaucracy—it is the Mount Everest of institutional absurdity—you can make anything funny.
Like I used to say in corrections: if you’re not crying, you’re dying.
Don’t worry, healthcare heroes, 911 dispatchers, emergency responders and those connected to you—your turn is coming! We know you’re out there spending more time documenting your work than actually doing it.
So, stay tuned for ironies that inspire through raw, real and rugged truth‑telling and perspective‑taking. And don’t worry, we’ll pepper in plenty of gallows humor too: but we want your insights from wherever your frontline may be.
Where exactly does reality punch your job description in the face? Tell Us Today!
What's the most spectacular example of bureaucratic self-sabotage you've ever witnessed?
When did “following protocol” almost guarantee the worst possible outcome?
At what point did you realize the system was designed by folks who've never actually done your job?
Submit your stories to Frontline Peer: help us document the beautiful madness of administrative burden from all sectors. Anonymous, de-identified story submissions are now open at FrontlinePeer.com where bureaucratic encounters with irony, paradoxes and comedy-of-errors are most welcome!
Questions? Get in touch. Share your comedy-of-errors to learn about public (mal)administration and help others find the humor in it all. Because, the alternative is drinking alone while muttering about incident reports.
And that's just Tuesday.
Cheers,
Micheal P. Taylor., Your Peer
This Friday: "The Incident Report Incident" — where proper documentation nearly kills someone, and everyone gets a commendation.