Write a short position paper on what we should do to get all our employees to behave more safely at work. At first glance, a dot-com is one of the last places you'd expect to find potential safety and health hazards—or so Jennifer and Mel thought.

There’s no danger of moving machinery, no high-pressure lines, no cutting or heavy lifting, and certainly no forklift trucks. However, there are safety and health problems.

In terms of accident-causing conditions, for instance, the one thing dot-com companies have is lots of cables and wires. There are cables connecting the computers to each other and to the servers, and in many cases separate cables running from some computers to separate printers.

There are 10 telephones in the office, many with 15-foot phone lines that always seem to be snaking around chairs and tables. There is, in fact, an astonishing amount of cable considering this is an office with less than 10 employees.

When the installation specialists wired the office (for electricity, high-speed cable, phone lines, burglar alarms, and computers), they estimated they used well over 5 miles of cables of one sort or another. Most of these are in the walls or ceilings, but many of them snake their way from desk to desk and under and over doorways. Several employees have tried to reduce the nuisance of having to trip over wires whenever they get up by putting their plastic chair pads over the wires closest to them.

However, that still leaves many wires unprotected.

In other cases, they brought in their own packing tape and tried to tape down the wires in those spaces where they’re particularly troublesome, such as across doorways.