Happy new year! (And some important reminders!)

Hello everyone! I hope the new year is treating everyone well!

As we all try and figure out the current evolution of the COVID-19 situation, just a friendly reminder that masks are still required while indoors at LMN. Safety glasses are also required when in the shop areas. When these two things find themselves in conflict (safety glasses are fogging up, for example), safety glasses take priority, BUT, get that mask back situated properly again as soon as is safe and practical.

We’ve had some mixed reports that safety glasses and masks are getting a little more relaxed wrt compliance around the space. The biggest reason LMN works is that we all contribute to and participate in making the space a safe place to work and play.

Please, keep this in mind as we continue into the New Year and help us support a healthy and safe community!

Brian

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Just for clarification, and to be sure I’m complying with the rules as a new member, I have 2 questions:

  1. Are glasses required whenever we are in the shop area, or only when operating equipment?

  2. Are masks required to be on when across the shop from another person, or is social distancing adequate?

Thanks for clarifying for me!

Hey @CarlG,

I just wanted to get back to you about these two questions, since I think we dropped this thread. So I’ll answer this keeping in mind that we define safety procedures in the space according to 3 principles: 1) your safety, 2) the safety of others, and 3) the safety of the space and equipment

  1. We want you to have glasses on whenever you walk into the shop area. It’s generally OK to have them off if nobody else in the shop is working with equipment, but if any of the machinery in the shop is on, we’d like you to have them on. This is both principles 1 and 2 at work. The best way to make sure everyone can work comfortably in the shop is to make sure people walking around have safety equipment on while they do so. If I were working in, say, the woodshop, I’d want to know that there was no chance I could injure someone else while I was there, so if someone didn’t have safety equipment, I’d feel a need to stop what I was doing.

  2. We’d like you to have a mask on when you’re in LMN, full stop. Unless the mask is interfering with your other safety equipment (e.g., fogging up glasses), you should keep it on even if you’re working in a separate area from someone. Our reasoning for this is that COVID lingers in the air for some time, and could potentially stay in the air where you were working even after you had left. Keeping a mask on helps curtail that. This is similar to our policy about other potentially harmful aerosols, such as spray paint or metal fumes, which is that we don’t let people use them in the space, since it could constitute a health hazard for someone else.

Thanks for asking for that clarification. Hopefully that helped understand the policies a bit more fully.