Guest blog – Dagmar Cotton

Dagmar Cotton reflects on a memorable trip to Moscow where she observed some interesting health and safety practices.

Pass the Vodka Pavel……

It was snowing hard and the hotel in Moscow was nice, and after an evening stroll over the river the extremely attractive ladies operating out of the hotel decided that my colleagues were not potential chat-up material and opted for a couple of affluent-looking Japanese businessmen. I had my credit card cloned as a thank you for my visit. No-one told us about the full body scanner at the airport, but by the look of the operator all ideas of modesty went out the window. Her face was as frozen as the snow outside as she had probably seen every permutation of the human body.

As we had just taken over a small Company and my colleagues obviously wished a favourable report, they took us out to lunch to a restaurant specialising in mushrooms. There were too many varieties to cope with, especially the boiled one that looked like an amoeba nestling in the bottom of the dish, but the Vodka was good and they could probably have drunk the gross national Vodka production without missing a step.

We arrived in Moscow in a snowstorm in a jet – we left in a Turboprop and as we taxied I was a bit concerned that all the parked planes were having their wings de-iced. A dip in the Baltic Sea in January did not exactly fit into my travel plans but we managed to reach Vilnius in one piece. If you have experienced travelling through Moscow International Airport, you will know what I mean by DIY travel, especially as our flight was slightly delayed due to “bad weather” and all flight calls were is Russian. Years of queuing for everything has produced a nation with sharpened elbows who have better tactics in a scrum than the All Blacks.

Our Lithuanian colleagues took us to a fish restaurant, but forgot to tell us that we had to catch the fish ourselves, so there we were, -8°C and fishing for trout in a pond in the middle of winter in the snow. And the fish was fantastic – thinly filleted raw and eaten on buttered brown bread with lemon. The mulled wine was very warming and the glow to my cheeks was better than a week in Tenerife. Lithuania also has a lethal brew called Mead – but not as you know it. 80° proof and pure alcohol, one sip closed my throat and curled my eyebrows.

On returning home I was watching a building worker at the airport cutting through a steel girder working from the top of a cherry picker. No safety harness, no goggles, no hard hat, no gloves and the sparks set fire to the front of his pullover. I was impressed by the way he beat out the flames with one hand and continued cutting with the other. Just then my flight was called and I almost missed the bit where he manhandled an 8ft section of girder into the top of his cherry picker on his own without falling out.

Dagmar Cotton is health and safety manager at bank solutions firm First Data International.
Dcotton@firstdatacorp.co.uk