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The rate of work accidents falls on Mondays after 10:00, coffee breaks to the rescue

Wow. I don’t often get stopped in my tracks by the personal pertinence of a news story, but by the time I got to work Monday I was wondering what was going on out there in the world. Now I see it wasn’t just chance because Monday morning really is dangerous!

In the space of 30 minutes between 07:00 and 08:00 I saw these near-accidents:

• a woman coming towards my car, who drove over a speed bump that she obviously hadn’t noticed because a) she was on her cell phone and b) she was leaning nearly out her driver’s window for some reason—her cell phone went flying out the window, nearly in my path
• a man suddenly swerved to the right ahead of me to park his car, illegally, to pick up a hitchhiker, just as someone decided to move into the right lane—a close call, brakes squealing
• a 10-year-old, old enough to know better, dashed into the road to pick up a soccer ball he’d dropped.

I stopped at a bakery to get a cup of coffee, thinking this was too much at that hour of the day. Just as I walked in the door a man at the counter, fumbling for change to pay for his coffee, dropped the cup and it splattered all over him and the woman at the cash register.

These people are the ones who don’t even show up in the accident statistics because they slipped through the bad luck net.

I’m definitely adopting that slogan: be careful, it’s Monday.

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