The Safety Audit

The safety audit at Copperline Paints had been scheduled for nine o'clock. Brent, the plant manager, had planned the morning down to the minute. There would be a final walk-through at eight and fresh coffee in the meeting room at half past, and the factory floor would be spotless by the time the inspector arrived. What he had not planned for was a gray car pulling into the car park at 7:30, and a woman in a hard hat stepping out of it with a clipboard under her arm.

Ms. Szymanski apologized for being early. Her previous appointment had been cancelled, she explained, and she was happy to begin whenever it suited him. Brent, who had been awake since five and was still on his first coffee, assured her that now would be perfect, and led her toward the mixing hall.

For the first forty minutes, everything went smoothly. The fire extinguishers had all been inspected, the ventilation was working properly, and every container had been correctly labelled. Then they turned the corner toward the loading bay, and Brent remembered the pallets. On Tuesday, a delivery of paint tins had arrived with nowhere to store it. Someone had stacked the boxes, just for one night, in front of the emergency exit at the end of the corridor. Nobody had moved them since.

Brent stepped smoothly in front of the auditor and gestured in the opposite direction. "The storage area's this way," he said. "There's nothing down there but the old staff room." It might have worked, had Marisela, who had operated the mixers on that line for eleven years, not been standing three meters away. She switched off her machine. "There's also the fire exit," she said quietly. "It's been blocked since Tuesday. I mentioned it at Wednesday's meeting."

For a moment, nobody spoke. Ms. Szymanski walked to the end of the corridor and studied the wall of boxes for a long time before writing something down. "Had there been a fire this week," she said, without raising her voice, "the people in this hall would have had one way out instead of two. You understand that this will have to go in my report." Brent did understand. He also began to suspect, a little late, that her cancelled appointment had never existed, and that she had come early precisely in order to see the factory as it really was.

Nobody needed to tell him what to do next. Before Ms. Szymanski had finished writing, Brent had taken off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and lifted the first box off the top of the pile. Marisela watched him for a moment. Then she walked over and took the next one.