X Days Since

A trope usually seen in comedy. Occurs where an institution holds a sign outside their facility stating "X days since the last [bad event]", usually a sign like this is used to indicate the building has No OSHA Compliance, with work-related accidents or outlandish catastrophes being the most frequent bad event. Sometimes being reset by occurrences within the episode. An increasingly common variant is the sign having to be reset as it is being updated. These signs still exist in real life, even as fiction relentlessly parodies them.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The Trigun manga, in an interesting variation of this trope, showed a sign in one city counting the number of murders and serious injuries that had occurred that day.

Comic Books

• The Incredible Hulk has the occasional counter indicating number of days without incident (in this case, "incident" means "Bruce getting pissed off enough to Hulk Out and break lots of things").
• It has been 0 days since DC Comics has done something stupid.

Comic Strips

• There was a Dilbert strip where somebody is putting up a sign that reads "8 days since the last accident", and then falls off the wheeled chair they're standing on.
  Dilbert: That's ironic.
  Injured co-worker: No, it was ironic when it happened nine days ago.
• A Tom Gauld strip in New Scientist shows two scientists walking past a sign saying "It has been 10001 days since this lab has had an accident", with one of them saying it's less impressive when you realise it's in binary.

Fan Works

• Doing It Right This Time: Tokyo-3 Municipal Middle School's Go club apparently has a "Days Since Last Nuclear Tesuji" counter. Asuka got herself kicked out for making them reset it during her first game, which she claims was just so she could say she'd done it and had nothing ("Well, not much"...) to do with the fact she's not a very good go player.
• The Infinite Loops: A loop crashing is supposed to be very rare and a very big deal that's best be avoided, so Anakin is very concerned when he sees a whiteboard on Ritsuka's Pocket says "17 loops since the last crash".
  Anakin: Not a good sign.
• Naru-Hina Chronicles: Naruto keeps a mental note of "how many pages since Hinata last fainted".
• In Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, there's a sign in Viridian Forest saying "251 Days since last known fatality". Unlike most examples, though, it's not Played for Laughs, but rather as a way to further establish that the new world is a lot more dangerous than the previous one.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh The Other Abridged Movie, an establishing shot of the school is captioned with "12 days since last Godzilla attack".

Films — Animation

• Luck (2022): In the teaser trailer, a rabbit resets a "Lucky Days in a Row" sign from 9,999,999,999 to zero when a human (Sam) wanders into the Land of Luck.
• Monsters, Inc.: A sign reading "Accident Free for __ Days" is reset from 47 to zero after the first "23-19" incident.

Films — Live-Action

• Transformers has one of these inside the Hoover Dam.
• During a shooty shootout in a shooter factory in Shoot 'Em Up, numbers are predictably shot off the sign until it displays 0. Shoot.
• Done in the movie Speed. In the finale, as the subway train crashes out of control through the construction area, there's such a sign. The subway train crashes through it.
• Played for Drama in Super 8, when an accident counter (at a very high count) at the Lillian steel mill is seen reset to zero before it is revealed that the accident caused the gruesome death of the protagonist's mother.
• In Young Doctors in Love after the assassin smokes inside an oxygen tent, causing it to explode, a nurse removes "1" from the stand marked: "Safety record. Accident free days."
• In Man of Steel, General Zod hits Superman into one of these signs on a construction site. The impact knocks two digits off the sign, thus the sign now reads "This job has worked 0 days without an accident."
• Played for Drama with the War Clock in Pacific Rim, which tracks the time since the last Kaiju attack and/or Jaeger pilot casualties (the two are virtually synonymous). When the portal is eventually destroyed, the order is given to "Stop the Clock."
• Used at least twice in the superhero film The Incredible Hulk, at both the start and the end, measuring how long it has been since the Hulk caused chaos.
• Modern Problems starts with a big sign "Congratulations New York air traffic control ... days without an accident!" The number is missing. Next minute the controllers deal with a plane dropping its luggage during takeoff, a Cessna pilot dying before landing and a Tunis flight mixing its bearing with a tuna sandwich price.

Literature

• Black Fleet Crisis mentions a sign in the lobby of the New Republic Senate reading "X Days Since The Last Shot Fired in Anger. Remember, Peace is No Accident!" When a new war breaks out, Chief of State Leia Organa Solo notices the sign and angrily orders that it be taken down. As the EU grew, it no longer fit with the established timeline, but it was a nice idea.
• The Bastard Operator from Hell had one in one episode. 10 days since last accident? "I think you'll find that's a binary number." And that's only because they don't count disappearances as accidents, or people who don't work there, or disappearances of people who don't work there... Suffice it to say, whatever health and safety compliance the Bastard's workplace once had is long gone. It gets reset at the end of the story by the CEO, with a case of The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much following the boss suffering "a tragic accident" in his office.
• At the end of Kris Longknife: Intrepid, Kris asks her AI companion Nelly to keep track of her time between people trying to kill her. Nelly snarks that she doesn't think she can count that low. At the start of Undaunted she's made it 63 days, on account of her explorer ship USS Wasp not having met a single living soul since her last port.

Live-Action TV

• The Office (US)
  • An episode features an "X Days Since Last Accident" sign in the warehouse. Michael caused an accident, requiring the sign (which had a high number on it) to be reset.
  • When Dwight becomes manager and declares a "no nonsense" workplace, Jim produces a joke sign that reads "4 days since last nonsense". Dwight sees the sign and changes the number to five.
• Happens non-comically in Lois & Clark, the counter is reset to zero because of something happening in the episode.
• When the film I Was a Teenage Werewolf was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the following comment was made at a shot of a high school sign:
  Tom Servo: Ten days since last teen pregnancy.
• The Daily Show: Jon Stewart's first televised reaction to the Henry Louis Gates incident:
  Jon: Now we have to reset the sign!
  (large sign reading "191 days without racial tension")
• An episode of Monk began within with a janitor being killed in an industrial trash compactor, with blood spattering onto the sign.
• In RoboCop: The Series the OCP Biohazard Containment Facility claims on a large billboard outside the main entrance "Proudly Accident-Free for 002 days".
• In the Constantine episode "A Feast of Friends", Constantine finds a body next to a sign indicating the number of days since the last accident and calmly updates the sign.
• The Colbert Report: In 2012-13, Stephen Colbert had a whiteboard which said "[X] days without a GOP rape mention", referring to how several prominent Republicans made insensitive comments about rape, which he'd erase whenever it happened again.
• In The Librarians 2014 "And the Hidden Sanctuary", Cassandra visits Havenport "the Safest Town in America", just as they're putting up a sign declaring "10,000 Days Since Our Last Accident". The statistical improbability of this — especially when she realises it means any accident — is the first sign that it is, of course, a Town with a Dark Secret.
• In The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell on Netflix the house that's home to all sorts of monsters and Ax-Crazy animals has a "days since last fatality" sign, with a note that Christine will make the residents banana splits if they get to ten days.
• Star Trek: Picard. While a group of workers on a derelict Borg cube are getting their safety briefing, there's a sign which reads: "THIS FACILITY HAS GONE (5843) DAYS WITHOUT AN ASSIMILATION."
• The Walking Dead: The Season 4 premier is titled "30 Days Without an Accident", which we see written on a whiteboard. After a Red Shirt dies on a supply run, the count is reset to zero.

Sports

• English Premier League: A common form of banter among teams, or Self-Deprecation.
  • Club Everton FC are in the midst of serious financial problems that have left them unable to buy or sign any new players for the team for quite some time. Disgruntled fans had set up a web site called "Everton Time" that tracks how many years, months, and days it's been since the club's most recent player purchases and signings.
  • Other notable sites include Since Arsenal Last Won A Trophy, Since Tottenham Last Won A Trophy, Since Luis Suarez Last Bit Someone, and so on.
• The Chicago Cubs, an MLB team, have long had a sign on one of the rooftops across the street starting with "AC", for "Anno Catuli" ("Year of the Cubs"), indicating the years since their last World Series title, NL pennant, and division title. As they last won these in 1908, 1945, and 2008 respectively, they recently (in 2008) had to add an extra digit for the 100th year since their last World Series title. As of November 2nd, 2016, all three signs had been reset to 0.

Tabletop Games

• Dark Moon has players trying to keep the installation running, while worrying about infected who will sabotage the outpost. The small sign on the board strikes out 502 days since the last accident, replacing it with zero.
• A fan joke about Exalted is that Creation's calendar is basically "X Years Since The Last World-Wrecking Wave".

Theme Parks

• In the queue line for The Incredible Hulk Coaster at Universal's Islands of Adventure, monitors show that there have been 278 days since the last Gamma radiation exposure incident. It soon after changes to 0 days.
• The ride Stitch's Great Escape! at Walt Disney World has the Galactic Federation's "Days Since Last Escape" as you exit the ride. The very high number is, of course, resetting since Stitch just escaped.

Video Games

• Played for laughs in Doom (2016). Upon completion of the first level, you come across a UAC propaganda hologram that proudly states "Welcome to the UAC - Now 221 Accident-free days!"...as the entirety of the level you played (and the hallway you are currently standing in) are soaked in blood and strewn with corpses.
• Inverted in the first Oddworld game: One of the scrolling information bars in Rupture Farms, a meat packing plant, reads "Only 1,234 work related injuries this month! Keep up the good work"
• Several Team Fortress 2 maps have a sign that reads "This Job Has Worked [0] Days Without an Accident". The Payload map Swiftwater has a non-zero numbers of days for the sign, but is appended with "that said, there have been a number of homicides". Yet another version is present on certain maps reading "This facility has operated [17] days with only [8] casualties".
• There was an unused texture in Half-Life that had a sign reading "Days since last accident" with a zero and the sign had blood splattered on it. In a case of history repeating itself, Black Mesa also has an unused "Days without accident" sign, encased in a shattered photo frame.
• BioShock has several of these signs throughout the game. At least one has fallen off the wall entirely.
• Ghostbusters: The Video Game has one of these signs shown in the firehouse just outside the door to the sleeping quarters/showers.
• One derelict spaceship in Mass Effect 2 has an "It has been five days since our last workplace fatality" announcement. Of course, said derelict spaceship is actually an Eldritch Abomination. It's to be expected. The only reason it's been as much as five days is the whole work crew are husks already!
• Sonic Colors: Eggman really is cutting corners with his attractions if they come with a "MINUTES without accident" counter!
  "Come aboard the asteroid coaster! Accident free for 45 minutes!"
• Dead Space has a "Days Since Last Accident" sign which predictably reads '0'. It shows up as a background image on its Steam library page.
• At the beginning of Portal 2, Chell is awakened from suspended animation and an automated voice claims "You have been in suspension for fifty days". She is then put to sleep again and when she wakes up, the room is visibly degraded and the voice (also degraded) says "You have been in suspension for nine nine nine nine nine...nine nine..."
• Broken Hill Quarry in Evolve has one of these. Some poor sap wrote over it to read 'This facility has gone 0 days without anyone being eaten'.
• The Orochi Tower in The Secret World features these on every floor, even the ones concerning daughter corporations that shouldn't have anything to do with serious workplace hazards, like publishing and banking. None of them have lasted longer than a month before being reset. By contrast, the group's weapons development department didn't even last twelve hours!
• At one point in Unreal: Return To Na Pali, in a Tarydium foundry, you're faced with a processing area that features an Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt and several serrated cutters that move at speeds between "painfully slow" and "stupidly fast" and are all covered in fresh red blood. The kicker is the sign on the wall at the start:
  It has been 0 days since our last accident.
• In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on the map "Vertigo" (set in an under-construction skyscraper), you can find a "This Jobsite Has Suffered X Injuries" sign in the Terrorist's spawn. It starts each match at 0, then increases for every player that falls off the map.
• In Destiny 2, it's possible to jump to one's death off the Guardians' Tower. There is a "Days since last incident" sign, that in fact keeps count of how long it's been since a player did that. It is, naturally, usually at zero.
• In Let's Explore the Airport With Buzzy the Knowledge Bug, one of the things you can click on in the baggage handling system is a "Days With No Accidents" sign, which changes the number when clicked, gradually changing it from 000 to 999. This is one of the items you have to find in the "Find it" mini-game, but the mini-game will only accept it if the number is at 000, as PeanutButterGamer points out in his "Goodwill Games #7" video.
• Two Point Hospital: On a radio advert: "Come to Grockle Bay Zoo! Almost no visitor fatalities for two-and-a-half weeks!"
• Starfield: In one location, there's an animated sign displaying "x days since the last accident". Naturally, players tested this and found that it does reset if you, say, throw a grenade at people.
• Starmancer has an "Oopsie Tracker" as part of the UI that lists how many deaths happened on your space station, and how many days have passed since the last death.
• Entropy : Zero 2 presents a "This job has worked 52 days without a [map] transition" sign in the Arbeit underground labs, right before a map change. Sure enough, after the next map loads in, the counter changes from 52 to 0. A variation of this sign found later on instead reads "This job has worked 0 days without a Combine invasion".

Web Animation

• Zero Punctuation: Yahtzee doesn't have that kind of restraint; he counts time since his last gay joke in hours instead of days.
• Betsy Lee, the creator of No Evil, has many talents, but by her own admission, typing is not one of them. As a result, one of her jokey outtakes videos has a big "2 Lines Since Last Typo" sign, which goes down to 0 as we watch.
• RWBY: Dr. Pietro Polendina has "Days Since Last Nonsense" scrawled on a blackboard in his office. When Team RWBY and friends meet him, the sign reads 0.

Webcomics

• Casey and Andy: Using seconds, because otherwise it'd remain on zero all the time.
• Dregs: The crew keeps track of how many days it's been since the last corpse sighting.
• Existential Comics has a "days without a Kant/can't pun" sign: the pun has been used only once, on the webcomic's 10th anniversary.
• Girl Genius offers "17 days without a major explosion" in the Baron's labs, and "No hideous death in 2 days" in the castle Heterodyne. There's a corpse caught in the process of updating the last one.
• In Housepets! Heaven has a "days since last shocking revelation" sign outside their orientation building. A chimera is seen resetting it after Keene is told that he's dead.
• Pictured: SEMME experiences one.
• In Penny Arcade, a rat exterminator company has a sign that reads "It has been x weeks since we killed a baby." A guy with an exasperated look on his face is resetting the count to zero.
• Precocious has days since the last horrible incident.
• Shortpacked! has a "Days Since a Horrible Pun" sign.
• In Spacetrawler Yuri the recovering homicidal cyborg has a "days without killing someone" sign.
  The door-to-door evangelist doesn't count.
• Trevor (2020): One whiteboard in the room with the security terminal is designated to how many days have gone by without an accident. By the time the story starts, the count is at 4, and it’s already outdated.
• In The Whiteboard several such signs show up occasionally, like "10 days since last mauling." In another strip Doc changes "days" to "minutes".
• xkcd: 38 days since someone reset this sign.
  • Com'c has one of these here, which openly admits^note "38 days since someone reset this xkcd reference" to be a reference to the xkcd example above.

Web Original

• In one of the Acts of Gord stories, he comes up with the idea of having an "X days since I've had to deal with an idiot" sign. The idea being that while dealing with an idiot, he would sigh and flip it back to 0, right in front of them. He hoped they'd be offended enough to leave.
• In Atop the Fourth Wall: The Movie, a whiteboard on the Caelestis has a "20 days without incident" marker on it. Once Mechakara takes over the ship, the "2" is crossed off, turning it into "0 days without incident".
• Design Doc, a channel that explains and reviews various game mechanics, criticizes Paper Mario: Sticker Star for its lackluster sidekick in the video about sidekicks. But before the narrator can proceed with it, the video cuts to a real-life footage of him resetting the "Days Since Cursing Sticker Star" to 0 on the whiteboard.
• Game Grumps: One of the show's recurring elements involves Arin breaking out into a standard beatbox rhythm which he rarely deviates from, much to the annoyance of some fans. Dan invokes this trope in Episode 32 of their "Link to the Past" playthrough, which has since become an in-joke among the fandom. One fan actually made and sent in a custom sign reading "It has been ___ days since Arin beatboxed." As Dan later points out, Arin's beatboxing is part of the Game Grumps intro, so it will always be zero days since Arin beatboxed.
• The website gayhomophobe.com has been running since 2004 and updates every time a Gay Conservative or similar type of hypocritical Armored Closet Gay person is outed. The site also has a minor ranking system that acknowledges those who made a complete turnaround and are now supporting gay rights.
• Modern Rogue has an injury counter that resets with alarming frequency, usually as a result of one of the hosts underestimating the inherent danger in whatever scientific experiment they're tinkering with. Most injuries are minor, requiring only a bandage, but several ER trips have been undertaken. "Reset the counter!" has become a Catchphrase for the show.
• The website for the 2008 Alternate Reality Game The Muppet Experiment had a sign on the door of Muppet Labs◊ saying "Day(s) without an accident: 0. No pain ... no gain."
• Neal.fun's Days Since Incident tracks the number of days since the last natural or man-made disaster.
• From Not Always Right we have this story about a chemistry student so accident-prone that the teacher made one of these signs just for them. Ironically, the accident that caused the counter to be reset was not the student's fault that time.
  • Also from Not Always Right, we have this tale of a store resetting their "days since a customer asked a stupid question" sign (it had been at a record of 99 days), submitted by the customer who asked the question.
• Reddit's Today I Fucked Up (TIFU) subreddit has an "X Days Since Reddit Shat Itself" counter. It rarely gets above 0.

Western Animation

• Duckman gets committed to a mental hospital in the "A Room With a Bellevue" episode of Duckman with a "It has been 3 days since our last 60 Minutes expose" sign out front.
• In The Simpsons:
  • In the new opening: Lenny & Carl are changing the "days without an accident" one higher, then the quitting time horn goes off and Homer runs out, knocking them over in the process.
  • A prison holds a sign counting the number of days since the last break out.
  • A trailer park has a sign counting the number of days without a tornado. And it's reset between scenes.
  • When Apu takes his citizenship test, the sign outside says something like "130 years without a civil war"
  • Then there's the "days since a suicide" sign at a divorcee hotel. As we see it, there's a gunshot and it resets to zero.
  • In the computer game Virtual Springfield, there's one of these on the wall in Sector 7G. If you click on one button, Homer presses it, then suddenly Lenny and Carl come running through screaming and on fire, then a countdown begins, stopping when Homer casually presses a button, and says "So that's what that button does!" If you look at the wall again, the counter has reset.
  • The sign at the Springfield International Airport says "no crashes since Tuesday", then immediately a plane crashes.
• In a Futurama episode a sign counts the days since Omicron Persei 8 last invaded Earth, and in another episode there's one in a working ground for slaves counting the days since the last accident. (Fry accidentally nails his own hand to the sign while changing the number, then reaches for the "1" sign anyway.) Also, there's one on the door to the cryogenic tubes Fry got frozen in.
• On an episode of Chilly Beach, one of the townspeople is changing a sign marked "Number of days Since Last Polar Bear Attack" from "0000" to "0001". He gets eaten by a polar bear and the number blows off.
• An episode of Back at the Barnyard has Freddy attempting to change the "Days since last accident" sign. When he does, he falls off the ladder he was using prompting a long and exaggerated cycle of him falling.
• In the King of the Hill episode "The Accidental Terrorist", just after Bobby got a ride on a car lift in a car dealership, the camera zooms towards the background showing the sign "2 days since the last accident."
• In the Star vs. the Forces of Evil episode "Blood Moon Ball", Tom wears a button that says he's been anger-free for 53 days. When he loses his temper and tries to kill Marco, Star defeats him, then magically changes his button to say 0 days.
• In one episode of My Gym Partner's a Monkey, Jake gets seriously injured, then slowly reaches over to one of these signs and changes it to zero.
• Ducktales 2017: When the harpies are accidentally released from Louie's "Harp-B-Gone" company, Huey's response is to sigh and change a "Days Without Incident" sign to zero. To be fair, it is the first incident the company's had, but since the company's less than a week old, it's still not incredibly impressive.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Hiccup Plague", Krusty Krab has a chalkboard that says "2 DAYS WITHOUT NONSENSE". After the hiccups SpongeBob captured gets in the way of his work, a disappointed Mr. Krabs erases the "2" and replaces it with "0".

Real Life

• A large number of real life industrial facilities have these safety scoreboards. Common ones include counters since "Last Recordable Injury" (one that needs more than basic first aid) and "Last Lost Time Incident" (one that causes missed work). Typically, rewards are given at big numbers, like a year without any form of injury, which can be a significant accomplishment in a large facility.
• From T-Shirt Hell (NSFW): "03687 days since the last time I gave a shit."
• The road running from Fort Irwin (California) to Barstow, the nearest town, has a sign reading: "This road is deceptively dangerous. It has killed __ injured __ this year. Please drive carefully." For symbolic effect, the sign includes a "map" of the road — pictured as a rattlesnake with a lane divider running down its back.
  • Several British roads have a similar but rather more understated sign, saying "__ killed, __ injured this year. Drive Carefully."
  • Electronic freeway signs in Illinois sometimes display a running count of drunk driving deaths in the state for the current year. The number is updated daily, so commuters can see how many people have died since the day before.
  • Similar signs can be seen at low-water crossings (basically concrete bridges on rural roads that are normally above the waterline of a stream or river, until heavy rainfall causes a surge.)
  • Similarly, "How Many Days Since Montague Street Bridge has Been Hit."
  • Some highways in Australia will have a sign that says "X days since the last local fatal accident". One example can be found on the Copper Coast Highway in South Australia, which also keeps tabs on the record for the most amount of days since a fatal accident (454 days as of January 12, 2019).
  • Many US military bases have electronic signs displaying "days since last DUI/traffic fatality." In the days immediately after a large unit's combat deployment these signs will continually reset.
• The members of Twelve-Step programs count the days since they last drank alcohol or otherwise returned to their addiction, and use visible symbols in the form of a poker-chip-like object for each drug-free month.
  • This can be seen in a sense with Booth's poker chip on Bones, though it's a single chip, not a growing pile.
• One power plant in Britain raised a flag to commemorate 100 days since the last accident. One day, while an employee was raising the flag, the counter-weight fell and shattered his skull.
• Keith Olbermann usually ended Countdown with "That's all for tonight, the Xth day since President Bush declared 'Mission Accomplished' in Iraq", which drove the point home that we were still in Iraq. When Obama was inaugurated, he said, "What, did you think that would change? Are the troops home yet?"
• Conversational Troping at the Discworld Convention 2012, there were "sects" that attendees could join. Every time someone had a line along the lines of "Let's talk about sects" or "Everything you wanted to know about sects" or so on, it would be met with a cry of "Reset the counter!" Although if the counter had actually existed, it would never have reached hours never mind days.
• This clock in Hiroshima counts the number of days since the first atomic bomb was dropped in that very spot, and the number of days since the latest nuclear detonation.
• After the 9/11 attacks, Brooklyn resident Cheryl Stewart posted a sign in her yard: "X Years X Days since 9-11-01. Where is Osama bin Laden?" She kept up with it until, 9 years and 232 days later, a passerby updated the sign with a note scrawled on a bit of notepad: "DEAD". The sign was then donated to the 9/11 Memorial, where it is on display.
• In 2001, German football club Hamburger SV, which had been on the top-flight for every season since the Bundesliga's foundation in 1963, had a large clock installed in its stadium marking the time the club had been in the first level. When the club was relegated for the first time in the 2016-17 season, the clock was reset to show the time since the club's foundation, but was eventually taken down two years later.
• Some public pools have signs for "Days Since There Was Pee In The Pool". Or worse.
• The official website for the movie Escape from Tomorrow had a counter for "Days Without Being Sued By Disney". Unfortunately for the film, Disney realized they were trying to trigger the Streisand Effect and didn't take action against it, leaving it to flop and sink into obscurity.
• The video game War Thunder has a surprising history of fans exposing government secrets to win arguments on its official forums (as of October 2023, this has happened thirteen times), leading to fans joking about a "X Number of Days Since War Thunder Players Leaked Official Documents" sign (along with yells of "RESET THE COUNTER!" every time it happens).

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0 days since the last browsing-TV-Tropes-Wiki-at-work incident

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