Comment by throwaway0a5e
4 years ago
Humor us all and think another few steps ahead. And what's EHS gonna do?
They're gonna CC the guy who's office is right beside yours because (surprise surprise) the departments and teams who's work results in them having weird nasty stuff buried in the back of the walk in fridge are the same people who know how to handle it.
EHS is just a coordinator. They don't have subject matter in everything. So they contact the experts. If your biology department fridge with Space AIDS(TM) in it it's because your department is the experts so you'll be getting the call.
Yes, I know how these things work, as my coworkers were those EHS people. The point is that they had training, and they are working within an official university context (laws, etc).
So why not save everyone the week of back and fourth emails while nothing gets done and ask them directly how they want to deal with it rather than putting tons of people on blast and substantially constraining their options by bringing intra-organization politics into the mix?
Sounds like a great way to get Normalization of Deviance[1]. One senior person says "I know how to dispose of this, so it's OK if I don't go through proper channels." Then the next person, following their lead without understanding the implications, says "Joe Senior over there disposed of something scary they found without wasting time going through EHS, so I'll do the same." Maybe it goes fine for a while, but eventually you'll end up with a situation where you've poisoned the groundwater or released dangerous chemicals into the air, because nobody is following the proper channels any more.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
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It sounds like you may have had a bad time with EHS in the past. I found that by making friends with everybody involved ahead of time, I suddenly had excellent service.
sadly, after 30 years of training to be a superhacker on ML, my greatest value is actually in dealing with intra-organizational politics.
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