Which small safety habits are worth picking up?

Six pages in this library are small safety habits, and one of them says of itself that it costs a second and asks for a reflex rather than vigilance. Put your foot through the strap and Take the wallet out before you sit down are about the bag on the floor and the wallet under one hip. Touch metal before you pump gas is one flat palm on the door frame. Treat every gun as loaded is for the day someone hands you one. Park a few spaces from the cart return is the car park. The birds are already telling you is the sound outside your window you have filed as weather. Each names where the habit stops and something else takes over.

Put your foot through the strap the moment you sit down, and take it out before you stand up. Put your foot through the strap says eight separate conversations, the widest agreement in its set, put a foot or a leg through a strap the moment they sit, or hold the bag between their legs, so that a quick grab has to move them too; five do the longer version, the strap looped round a chair leg or clipped to the table. Three accounts fell over forgetting the second half. One account says the habit’s real gift is not the thief but the forgetting: you cannot walk off and leave a bag that is attached to your ankle. Two lines sit above the habit: one contraindication says never fight a group, and one caution rated high says that in some places resisting a snatch ends in violence or in being dragged, so the strap is meant to stop a quick grab, not to win a fight, and a bag is replaceable where a foot or a face is not. If the bag is being pulled from you, the page’s own line is to let it go. It is not a lock either: two cautions say a strap cuts in a second, one caution rated high says a padlock on a zip is bypassed with a pen jammed into the teeth beside it, and three conversations hide the openings instead, zips turned inward against the body, the bag worn on the front in a crowd. Where it earns its keep is the train, the bus, the café and the library table; the airport is argued in four exchanges the page does not settle.

Take the wallet out of your back pocket before you sit down, and take the cards out of the wallet. Take the wallet out before you sit down says ten separate conversations moved the wallet to a front pocket, a jacket pocket or a bag, and the reason nobody there argues about is theft: eight conversations say the back pocket is where wallets are taken from, out of your sight and on skin that feels little, and the page checked that standard police advice says the same. The reason they do argue about is your back: eight conversations say a thick wallet under one hip for hours tilts the pelvis and presses on the nerve and muscle in the buttock until the leg hurts, and the page checked the medical literature and says it describes that cause as real and uncommon; a physiotherapist in two conversations says a couple of hundred grams cannot tilt a pelvis, three prevalence notes say people have sat on a wallet for life without a twinge, and the exchange runs three accounts to four, unsettled. The page says the habit does not need a winner, and five conversations say the second half is most of the cure for both problems: a wallet with three cards in it is neither a target nor a wedge. For trousers with no working front pocket, which six accounts in two places say clothing sold to women often lacks, the accounts’ options are a jacket, a small bag, or the habit in the title, out of the pocket and onto the desk when you sit. One line the page will not diagnose past: pain that runs down the back of a leg, or numbness, tingling or weakness in a leg or foot, is a question for a doctor or a physiotherapist, whatever you were sitting on.

Touch the metal of your car before you touch the nozzle. Touch metal before you pump gas is two people who independently carried the same habit, and one sentence of physics the page gives: a static spark can ignite gasoline vapour. Dry winter air lets the charge your clothes generate ride along instead of leaking away, and at a pump the space around the filler neck carries fuel vapour, which is what actually burns; a palm flat on the door frame before you reach for the nozzle lets the charge drain early, small and far from the fumes. Winter is when the risk peaks, and the people behind the habit do it year-round. Two companion habits from the same people finish the job: if you climb back into the car mid-fill, sliding across the seat rebuilds the charge, so touch metal again; and if a fire ever starts at the pump, leave the nozzle where it is and hit the station’s emergency stop rather than yanking the hose, because pulling a burning nozzle spreads the fuel.

Treat every gun as loaded, including the one just checked and the one in pieces. Treat every gun as loaded is for the uncle at the holidays, the friend at a range, the host on a hunting weekend, and the hands you were never taught what to do with. Six separate conversations give the first rule, that every gun is loaded regardless of what the owner says, regardless of the check you watched, regardless of whether it is in pieces on the table; six give the second, that the muzzle points only at something you would be content to destroy; five give the third, that the finger stays off the trigger and outside the guard until you mean to fire; and several single accounts give the fourth, know the target and what is behind it. Two conversations and three corrections insist the first sentence is not a claim about the chamber, because a gun lying on a table does not fire on its own; it is a drill, practised on empty guns so that your hands already do the right thing on the day a gun is not empty. Three separate conversations say racking the slide is not clearing a gun: one correction says a damaged part can leave a round in place, and another says that with the magazine still in, racking loads a fresh one; clearing means removing the magazine, then looking into the chamber from the rear. One contraindication says an untrained person should not be handed a gun at all, and the safest sentence a non-owner has is ‘I haven’t been taught — you keep it.’ For a child, three conversations give the rule several cautions insist is the whole of gun safety for a child: stop, do not touch it, leave the room, tell an adult, taught whether or not your own house has a gun. If anyone in the room has been drinking, one contraindication says the guns are put away. The page says plainly it is four sentences and not a firearms course, and that the law on storage, carrying and liability is a gap it does not answer; if you live where guns are not present, the page’s reading is that it is for the day you travel or visit.

Park two or three spaces along from the cart return, not beside it. Park a few spaces from the cart return carries an argument thirty conversations have had for thirteen years: nineteen separate conversations recommend parking beside the return, so that returning the cart is a short job you actually do, and thirteen say that is where the dents come from, because shoppers shove carts at the corral from a distance and miss, and three accounts who worked in retail agree. Two accounts and a third do the arithmetic neither camp had: any spot between the door and the return is the same total walk, so the return spot saves you the empty-cart leg and nothing else. The synthesis the argument produces, which the page offers as its own: two or three spaces from the return, uphill if the lot slopes, with another car between you and the corral. Two lines sit above the argument, not inside it: never clip or balance an infant car seat on a shopping cart, two warnings call it unsafe and the page adds that the seat is not made for it; and never leave a child in the car while you walk a cart back, whatever the distance, because a closed car heats fast in warm weather and a caution says even a brief wait is risky on a very hot day. Unload the child last and the cart first. Four separate conversations from the American South and three more from hot places say the only rule that matters in summer is shade, and in snow or with a mobility limit the page says the nearest space to the door is right.

The signal is a change in the background sound, and it tells you something is there without telling you what. The birds are already telling you says the sound outside your window is a running commentary made by animals whose survival depends on knowing what has just walked into the garden, and that a fair amount of what it carries has been measured. Researchers presented black-capped chickadees with fifteen species of live predator and counted the dee notes on the call: the number went up for the smaller raptors, which the page says is the reverse of what anybody guesses and exactly right, because a small agile hawk in tight woodland is far more dangerous to a chickadee than a big slow one. Birds do not go silent for a hawk, the page corrects; they switch to a thin, steady, high note built to be difficult to place, and for something on the ground, a cat, a snake, a raccoon, they do the opposite, loud, abrupt, broad, easy to locate, because that call is an invitation to mob. So a garden gone eerie and thin is telling you to look up, and a garden making a racket in one spot is telling you where. The page’s safety line comes first: look from a distance, and look before you walk, because a mob will lead you to a snake as readily as to a hawk, wherever you live some of the local snakes may be venomous, and it will also lead you to a raccoon or a cat that bites when cornered; if you cannot identify what is there, that is your answer, leave it, keep children and dogs back, and call local animal control or the wildlife agency. Most snakes are harmless and doing you a favour with the rodents; do not kill one unless you know it is dangerous, and if in doubt leave it be, because trying to kill it is how people get bitten, and some species are protected. What the calls cannot tell you, the page says, is most of it: hawk or cat is not separable from the sound alone, silence meaning weather or silence meaning predator is the same, and the folklore layer, birds going quiet before rain, dragonflies flying low, ants moving uphill before a flood, pine cones opening and closing with the damp, is not backed up there. City birds on a steady human food supply are a flatter, less readable proposition. Researchers at a US university wearing masks while banding crows were scolded by that face for at least 2.7 years afterwards, and the scolding spread to crows that had not been there.

Who these pages are not for. The strap page is not a plan for a fight and refuses one country-specific strand whole; reporting a theft, insurance and armed robbery are gaps it names. The wallet page sends leg pain to a clinician and does not carry an argument about a particular kind of back-pain practitioner. The gun page is not a course, and two cautions in its conversations say an online discussion is no substitute for one. The cart page is not for anyone who walks to the shop, whose shops have no corrals, or who has a mobility limit or a loaded cart in snow, for whom the door is right. And the birds page says learning any of it by ear takes real time, that there is no shortcut, and that a bird going quiet is information, not an answer.