“How to Have an Accident at Work”

I am not above taking obscene joy in watching Donald hurt himself over and over. I have, after all, used the phrase, “Donald Duck, Aquatic Sociopath” often enough that someone else referenced it as one of my catchphrases this week. Seeing him get a little something back, especially when it’s his own fault, is satisfying. I’m only human. And I suspect that the Disney animators were, too, because they chose to use Donald and they chose to have him grievously injured over and over again. It’s just so right.

Donald is, for this short, married. He gets up in the morning and yells at his wife and child for making things in the house unsafe. Then he’s off to work, where he is the employee obviously most responsible for how the factory’s “no accidents since” chart never actually rolls over past zero. He gets clothing stuck in machines. He makes a sandwich with several of them. He smokes while painting an enormous “no smoking” sign and blows himself up by igniting paint fumes. The only reason he doesn’t seem to hurt anyone else is that the only other employee we see is the factory nurse.

I mean, obviously, no one in a factory in the real world is going to be quite so dangerous as Donald. It’s not physically possible. He’s got Tone Armor, where he can’t even be truly injured in any kind of permanent or bloody way, because it’s a Disney cartoon. I’d also love to see someone getting away with spreading a full picnic banquet, complete with tablecloth, vase of flowers, and bowl of fruit, on top of a machine. But it is true that one of the biggest causes of accidents is carelessness. It’s also true that Donald is the character in the Disney canon best suited to represent it.

There is also the narrator, a sprite by the name of J. J. Fate (Bill Thompson). He is bitter, deservedly so, because of all the people who insist that their accidents are caused by fate instead of, say, their own horrific behaviour. Donald even says the actual words. Is it fate? It is not. It is Donald’s carelessness. And if his accidents are less probable than those in, say, “Shake Hands With Danger,” well, live action versus cartoon, after all. Variants on it likely do happen, and likely they endanger more than just the person being careless. It’s not at all difficult to imagine the smoking one setting fire to a factory in the real world.

Some accidents are no one’s direct fault—metal fatigue or something caused by weather or similar. Most are not. Most of the accidents I’ve been in or known of over the years were definitely someone’s fault. The worst, the ones I grumble over for years after the fact, are ones where the careless person wasn’t harmed by the incident in any way. (I was in a car accident once . . . .) Those are the ones you figure Donald would be causing all the damn time, with nothing anyone could do about it. Fate? No. Just that Aquatic Sociopath again.