Fail-safe.

I used to drive to the office. The drive could be a hassle, but the place was pleasant. Good old-fashioned cubicles, none of this stupid and counterproductive open-concept office nonsense. You could actually get work done. The company seemed to like it. They had painted one of the conference rooms with custom-designed company images, and a couple of years later painted another to look like a forest. Really nice job, too. Painters worked on it for weeks.

A short while after the forest went up, a rumor started to swirl that we were pulling up stakes and moving closer to the main New York office, in midtown Manhattan.

"No way," I said. "They just painted a whole freaking forest in 7B!"

Six months later I started taking the bus to midtown Manhattan and riding a subway from the Port Authority to the office.

My commute became longer and more annoying and more expensive.

The forest did not save me.

Sometimes when you tell yourself there is an ace in the hole, a fail-safe, that you're protected and can relax. Probably the classic example is "The Germans will never cross the Maginot Line!" Well, yes and no....

Some fail-safes work very well. I've always admired the ingenuity and courage of Elisha Otis, in coming up with a simple but effective device to stop an elevator from crashing and for testing it in public with his own personal life. Even now, elevator mechanic is a risky job. It's like being an auto mechanic if the car has to be driving around while you're propped at the engine. I've seen an elevator crash from the lobby to the cellar while someone was working on it, but fortunately it was a short fall and he was okay. It's not always the case.

Other fail-safes are only so-so. We're told this year that the flu season is looking like a doozy, so get those flu shots. On the other hand, recent years' shots have had pretty poor effectiveness. It's easy to understand why, the flu vaccine being an annual guessing game, but it doesn't make us more confident in it. I may get the shot, but I'm not going to march onto a ward full of flu patients afterward if I can avoid it.

I guess the point is, safety measures are great, but we always must be careful about relying on them too much. In the case of the flu shot, other commonsense precautions like hand-washing, avoiding infected people, and not licking subway car handles are important to follow as well. In the elevator -- well, there's nothing you can do if you're on the elevator and it plunges like a rocket to the subcellar. Pray.

Of course, if the escalator gets stuck, stay calm and wait for help. Better safe than sorry.