The safety goat is your shop or site safety officer, what bleats at you to put on your safety Mc’Glarses and stuff like that.
Occasionally (rarely) helpful, they are usually hired as a prevent-defense in order to make sure the company does not get sued.
They may actually suggest things which are, in practice, unsafe or ridiculous; owing to a lack of true practical experience in the art of whatever you are doing. (For example, always requiring that you wear a bulky body harness when above a given elevation, even though you are in the middle of a football-field sized flat roof at an aircraft factory, with no anchoring points within 40ft and nothing overhead to attach your harness to—because it’s “in the rules.”)
In the Empire of Dirt, the safety goat is personified by Prudence, a small plastic toy goat who bleats when her button is pressed. She reminds us to be *prudent* and wear safety mcglarses in the shop, not to put our fingie where we wouldn’t put our dinkie, and keep one hand in our back pockets when troubleshooting live electrical panels.
Submitted by: David