Seems stupidly obvious, doesn't it? You walk on burning hot coals, you burn your feet. Motivational training companies don't get paid those massively high fees just for their ability to bullshit, though. They do, so we're told, actually get people to walk on coals and block out the searing pain.
Unfortunately for one woman, in the fight between mind and matter, matter won. One day her company, the bean counters Deloitte & Touche, sent her on a touchy-feeling motivational team-building course run by SI Corporate Development, and she walked over some hot coals.
The point was to prove that her anxieties about barbecuing her plates of meat were unfounded. Unfortunately, no one seems to have bothered asking her if there was anything that might affect the reaction of her feet to the hot coals and she seems to have forgotten to mention the lighter fluid she spilt all over her feet when she was refilling her zippo the other day, just after she'd squirted a load of petrol over herself when she pulled the pump out prematurely. Either that or the "pedicure fluid" was responsible. In any case, SI Corporate Development were fined £3,000 for Health & Safety at Work failings.
Deloitte, in a carefully risk-managed yet somewhat lacking in emotion manner (well, they are accountants, after all), said the incident was "regrettable".
Photo taken from pkeleher/Paul's Flickr photostream under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence
