Picking up Boxes at Work: Boringly Detailed Health & Safety Guide 📦

Picking up boxes at work business guide

Picking up boxes at work is one of the most dangerous activities your employees will ever undertake whilst working with your business.

So dangerous, in fact, The Picking Up Boxes at Work Act 1974 exists to regulate the matter. As failing to pick up a box correctly can result in catastrophic limb loss and/or broken fingernails.

It’s good business practice to avoid such an outcome. As such, in this stunningly boring guide we’ll take you through the box picking up procedures your business will need to avoid widespread death and destruction.

How to Pick Up a Box At Work: Guide for Employers to Lecture Employees With

As with wearing speedos in the workplace, boxes are very similar (perhaps in a loose sense). Especially if you have boxes filled with speedos at your workplace.

Irrespective of swimwear, The Picking Up Boxes at Work Act 1974 stipulates on page 551 of 3,421 in section 43 (a):

“Picking up a box at work is fraught with horrifying portent, with the potential for severe injury a grave one. As such, it is your duty of care as an employer to ensure all employees understand how to pick up boxes at work. Failure to correctly train members of staff in this box picking up endeavours may result in the collapse of capitalism (i.e. the free world) and a lapse into state-wide communism (i.e. the end of mankind).”

With the above in mind, it’s wise to train your employees on everything to do with bending down to pick up a cardboard (or otherwise) box).

Picking Up a Box: Step-by-Step Guide

Gather all of your employees into a small room and turn up the heating so the conditions are cramped, humid, and obnoxious.

This is the perfect setting to laboriously teach them about how to pick up a box.

You’ll need one or more cardboard boxes in the room to demonstrate the process laid forth below. Get a manger to perform the box lifting demonstration and to talk your idiotic members of staff through it. It’ll go like this:

Manager begins the demonstration.
Manager moves towards the cardboard box of choice.
He/she bends knees and lowers down steadily towards the ground.
Using one, or more, hands the manager will seize hold of the, aforementioned, box.
The manager will bellow with all his/her might, “BEHOLD! I NOW HAVE HOLD OF THE BOX!”
The manager should pause at this moment whilst his/her underlings coo in appreciation at the astonishing physical achievement.
To complete the manoeuvre, the manager must then rise back up into a standing position whilst holding the box. Thus, completing picking up a box.

Despite such a clear demonstration, your employees, dumb as they are, will have stupid questions to ask your manager.

This may be along the lines of:

“If there’s more than one box, say one hundred and thirty five of them, do I pick them all up at the same time?”
“What if the box is on fire? Do I still pick it up?”
“Should I pick up a box if it contains live rattlesnakes?”
“What if the cardboard box is really, really big and it’s difficult to actually pick it up without throwing my back out?”

Your manager should, through gritted teeth, patiently answer such vacuous questions. Then he/she must demand ALL employees perform a demonstration of picking up a box to display they understand the process.

Yes, this is awkward and embarrassing for everyone.

However, it needs to be done! As if you don’t, one or more particularly stupid employees may pick up a box, throw out their back, collapse on the floor, and be crushed to death by the box landing on them.

That’d be bad for workplace productivity. Sad face. 😟

How NOT to Pick Up a Cardboard Box

There are several ways of picking up a box that are so dangerous it’d be safer to swim with great white shakes (minus a cage) than perform such a box-based manoeuvre.

Examples of dangerously picking up a box at work include, but aren’t limited to:

Using a revving, rusty chainsaw to pick up boxes (this can lead to lacerations to human skin and will also simply destroy the boxes).
Kicking at the boxes to make them move (i.e. being too lazy to actually pick up the box).
Blowing the box up with dynamite in an act of insubordination.
Karate chopping boxes in the belief this may make them move.
Attempting to engage in Star Wars type, The Force-based telepathic movement of objects (which is, naturally, doomed to failure as only Luke Skywalker can do that now Yoda is dead).
Believing box lifting to be the ideal demonstration of masculinity, thus leading to slinging of boxes around everywhere.

You can guarantee some employees will create new and intriguing ways to screw up moving boxing around, so keep a checklist of bone-crunching accidents due to boxes.

This way, you can introduce safer procedures that protect your boxes from damage.

Box-Based Conclusions for a Happy Box-Based Workplace

Remember, a box is for life. Not just for Christmas. As such, it’s important you treat your workplace boxes with respect.

Under The Picking Up Boxes at Work Act 1974 it clearly states you must respect all of your workplace boxes as equals. Equals as boxes. And equals to the employees who are bending down appropriately, knees bent, to pick them up.

In the event employees discriminate against boxes (such as loudly announcing in the office, “I ****ING WELL HATE CARDBOARD BOXES, ME!!“), then you must punish the offending member of staff. Suitable methods of punishment include: