A seemingly silly gesture is done for the sake of safety.
doctors should do this, although perhaps with less yelling.
I liked this a lot and was going to tumbl it myself but you beat me to it.
“In the rail context, when train drivers wish to perform a required speed check, they do not simply glance at a display. Rather, the speedometer will be physically pointed at, with a call of ‘speed check, 80'—confirming the action taking place, and audibly confirming the correct speed.”
Reginald Braithwaite:
If you don’t point to the knot on your harness when calling out that you are tied in, and we don’t audibly call out “On belay… belay on” to each other, we aren’t climbing together.
These exact same rituals have been developed for climbing because everyone, experienced, and inexperienced, can make mistakes.
The greatest climber of her generation (of any gender!), Lynn Hill, opens her autobiography with the story of how she was distracted while tying in, and nobody thought to check her, because, well, she’s LYNN HILL.
She climbed 75’ up an easy (for her) warmup climb, called for tension on the rope, sat back, and fell the entire distance to the ground. She was very lucky to survive.
Rituals are an important part of safety.
My theory is that this extends to subtler forms of safety, like ‘not burning out from overwork, shooting up your office and taking a bus full of tourists hostage’. The coffee/cigarette break gives an opportunity for decompression and self-reflection in much the same way as prayer.
Writing “CORRECT LEG” on a patient’s left leg before surgery might seem silly but it’s a lot better than the alternatives
“what idiot wrote RIGHT LEG on the left leg? stupid nurses…”
a lot of pilots often do this as well, though it’s not quite on the same level of being a general rule as with Japanese train companies, but it totally helps
Yeah, if you listen to actual pilot radio chatter, the popular conception of it in media is totally wrong. Pilots/ATC almost never say “roger” to affirm a command, they always repeat the command back with their callsign to be sure they got it right, e.g.
ATC: “United two-one-four, turn heading one-eight-zero, climb and maintain four thousand”
Pilot: “Turn heading one-eight-zero, climb and maintain four thousand, United two-one-four”
That way if the pilot heard it wrong they can be corrected, instead of just saying “roger” when they could have the totally wrong idea of what to do and no one would know. Safe system design is all about including rituals like this.
The call-and-response is important. Two people can have a conversation and think that they are agreeing but have completely different takeaways.
DJ: all the ladies in the house put your hands up!
ladies in the house: *verbally confirm that their hands are indeed up*
I recall a story from the daughter of a military pilot, whose dad would always say the words “you have control” when he handed her back her baby - and wouldn’t actually let go of the baby until she said “I have control” back to him.
