Tuesday 17 November 2009

Woughton Centre, Milton Keynes – Accident / Incident Frequency Report

Go to: Audio Journal / twitter.com/mjasmith


Source: MJA Smith


M and I took our eldest daughter to her first dancing exam on Saturday at the Woughton Centre in Milton Keynes. I’ve taken S here for one of her lessons, and several years ago went to a gig here at the Pitz (Client supporting Mick Jones and Tony James's Carbon / Silcon; click here for my review of Client). It’s not a terribly auspicious place, but the dancing school is good and S enjoys it, and that’s the main thing.

Whilst waiting to go in for the exam, as S was busily putting on her jazz shoes, I noticed this printed piece of paper, which I found a bit strange. It basically seems that the Centre – either by law or entirely voluntarily – needs to list the number of accidents that have occurred during the last half of the year.

I can’t possibly think why this might be. Is it supposed to enable some sort of Which?-style comparison between leisure centres for safety records? Surely not. However, as with all statistics, it’s all relative and unless you’re able to make a meaningful comparison there is often little value in simply showing absolute numbers. On this measure, what a terrible month May was – at seven, the highest number of individual incidents of the past half year. A grave month indeed, for both staff and customers it seems. I blame the onset of Summer.

The best of these incidents, or worst depending on your viewpoint, must surely be ‘violence’, which is defined beneath as ‘fights and violence towards staff’. Why on earth would you even think about advertising this to customers unless you absolutely had to? And in only seeming to selectively show violent incidents toward staff, what about violence among customers? Doesn’t that matter? And what do they classify as violence anyway? Murder? Bringing a machete into the changing rooms? Biting thy thumb at thee for beseeching thy Nike‘s? What?

I also especially like the fact that there are three incidents described as ‘bumps incurred through moshing’ during Pitz events. When I think of moshing, not that I’ve ever been known to throw myself willingly into a moshpit, I hardly think of ‘bumping’ – kicks to the shins and punches in the face perhaps, but never ‘bumping’, which to my mind sounds awfully polite and rather pleasant if you ask me.

Follow me on Twitter.

No comments:

Post a Comment