15 Subtle, Everyday Things Designed to Save Your Ass

Tactile paving — bumps or ridges on the ground — was designed to help visually impaired pedestrians avoid hazards. But even with perfect sight, deep in your head, you know if you feel that texture beneath you, you’re too near something.

A fun thing to do in the shower: slip over and crack your damn head open! Wait, no! It’s the opposite! There’s no way of knowing how many lives anti-slipping measures, often in the form of textured floors, have saved. 

If your car windows were made of regular glass, you’d have died a hundred times. Tempered glass and laminated glass might look like the normal stuff, but they’re the difference between every knock being a mild annoyance or full decapitation.

Way more shit around you is designed to be reflective than you realize. Road markings, licence plates, signs, panels on clothes — all small measures to make stuff more visible at night, and you marginally less likely to plough through it. 

Sim City made urban planning seem a fucking doddle, but there’s more to it. Infrastructural tricks like curb extensions and raised crosswalks gently control traffic flow to prevent speeding and make you drive safely — whether you want to or not. 

Anti-lock braking systems are just part of a car. They’re there, hardly warranting any thought, but holy shit, the amount of lives those things have quietly saved is well into the millions. They’re just, you know, boring. 

Fuses cost about a penny. There’s nothing to them, these goofy-looking inch-long whatsits. But if not for them, surge protectors and circuit breakers — all boring, all ignorable, all just there — ha ha ha we’d be on fire all the time. 

Picture a cigarette and you picture a filtered one, but that wasn’t always the case — they were introduced in the 1950s. While they’re far from perfect, and smoking remains extremely unhealthy, they do reduce lung cancer risk significantly. 

Chances are, apart from in that one episode of Breaking Bad, or using the towers as a landmark to know you’re near the airport, you never think about air traffic control. Oh fuck, it’s so complicated! And if it was done badly, so many people would die every day!

Imagine how much more dangerous life would be if nobody could see what the fuck they were doing. If you wear glasses, contact lenses or even sunglasses, chances are they’ve helped you avoid doing stupid fatal shit hundreds of times.

Start a conversation about water-treatment plants and you’ll see people’s eyes glaze over pretty quickly. However, when they have enormous inescapable diarrhea from drinking untreated water, they pay it a lot of attention. Makes you think, almost. 

If we’re talking saving asses, we need to mention actual, not figurative, asses. People spend enormous amounts of time improving the ergonomics of chairs, desks and couches — if we worked 21st-century jobs on Victorian chaises longue we’d be absolutely fucked.

Louis Pasteur: legend. His work, and the work of everyone that followed, means we can drink milk without shitting our pants. Raw milk is splatty-shit city, and in extreme circumstances, can lead to paralysis or death. Pasteurization rules, yo.

Nobody has a sick back tattoo proclaiming their love of building codes, but without the regulations they bring? Chaos. You know how you can run down a flight of stairs quickly without incident? Good luck on uncoded non-standardized steps, motherfucker!

It’s nice to live without expecting everyone you encounter to kill and eat you. We owe some of that to the basic idea of the rule of law — that bad behavior brings consequences. That’s stopped so much crazy shit happening!