Safety Spectacles
When you innocently embark on a little project to overhaul that cheap house “in need of renovation” that you bought, you think, among other simple beliefs, that all safety specs are the same. You just want something to keep the crud out of your eyes when you’re trying to ‘expertly’ cut those paving slabs to the right size with a masonry chisel and club hammer, right? That is until you are on your fifth paving slab and you are starting to get up a bit of a sweat and the surrounding air temperature is pretty low. Then you realise that your cheapo safety specs mist up. Not good as you can’t then see what you’re doing and break the paving slabs in the wrong place, not to mention your fingers.
I bought my first pair of ‘anti-mist’ safety specs around ten years ago, they had pink arms but, what the heck, if they are anti-mist then I will put up with the inane comments right? Anyway, It is my firm belief that some genius marketing guru stood wearing a pair of these wonderful safety specs in a warm, dry, air-conditioned room and ‘realised’ “Hey, these don’t mist up”. Because they bloody well do under the circumstances described in the preceding paragraph, getting sweaty in a cold environment.
The other time safety specs mist up is when you are wearing a respirator or dust mask. There is invariably a little gap at the top of the dust mask which directs your out-breath in behind your glasses and again, in a cold environment, they mist up. Actually, the 3M 4251 Respirator, is pretty good as it has a wide-edged rubber seal all around where it contacts your face. Now I just need to find a good pair of anti-mist safety-specs to go with it.
Just a little aside story: I started my apprenticeship, at the Engineering Industrial Training Board (EITB), Estover, Plymouth, at the tender age of sixteen. I think that the idea was to keep us new apprentices away from our respective parent companies for the first year, until we could at least indicate that we were not actually a liability let alone competent. One of the first things we had to do was be fitted out for a pair of safety boots. So there we were, 25 sixteen-year-old boys surrounded by boxes upon boxes of these great heavy steel toe-capped boots. Anyway, the inevitable happened. I took my shoes off to try on a pair of boots and promptly dropped one on my foot. Ouch. I mentioned this later to a friend of mine and he said he’d done something similar as he’d poked him self in the eye with the arm of a pair of safety spectacles 🙂 .
