Baccalauréat · Série F · Anglais — 2022

Text — The safety rule nobody wrote down

On his first morning at the site, Issa was given a helmet, a pair of gloves and one piece of advice: « Never trust a switch you did not turn off yourself. » He wrote it on the inside cover of his notebook and forgot about it.

Four months later he was working on a lighting circuit on the second floor. A colleague had told him the power was off. Issa had the screwdriver in his hand when he remembered the sentence. He went down three flights of stairs, checked the board, and found the breaker still closed. Someone had switched it back on to test a pump.

He says now that the walk downstairs cost him four minutes. He has never been able to say what it saved him, because nothing happened — and that, he adds, is exactly the difficulty with safety. Its successes are invisible. You only ever hear about the times it failed.

He teaches the same sentence to every apprentice he trains. Most of them write it down. He has stopped hoping that they will believe it straight away.