Yes, it is another day but we don’t have another dollar. Prices of items going up, availability of items going down, and most everyone has less to spend. That is too negative for an ole senior retired person to think about, so I will attempt to alter the message.
This morning as I was partaking in my first cup of homemade coffee, I had the TV on. I noticed a commercial for some truck line. I think they were advertising for new drivers but I am not sure, what I think I saw was two people standing together while another person on a standup fork lift (on a stand-up fork lift, the operator stands up to operate the unit) drove behind them. Now it seemed to me, and I could be wrong, that the operator was looking at the load that was on the lift while backing up. In other words, it seemed as if this operator was not looking where he / she was going.
The commercial caused this ole retired person to think about “fork lift safety”.
Back in 1971, wow, that is over ten years ago, I went to work for HWI. When I went to work there the building was still under construction. While the union construction workers were there, we the HWI employees were not allowed to use any motorized equipment. So, when we unloaded a truck, we would put the cartons on pallets, sign for the merchandise and the union worker would haul the pallet of merchandise to the location that we designated.
Now we were allowed to use pallet jacks, but these were all manual units. That means if you had a pallet of pipe fittings that weighed 2,000 pounds, you would push the pallet jack into the pallet, pump the handle which would lift the pallet, and then you could either pull or push the pallet where you want to go. We were pulling and pushing pallets all over the 200,000 square foot building.
For a while when we would pull a pallet across the building and drop off the pallet, we did get to ride them back to receiving. Yep, we stand on them with one foot and push with the other, kind of like a kid riding a push scooter. All good things must end, they said it was unsafe to ride the pallet jacks like a scooter.
Any way back to my original thought, fork lift safety, I remember when we received fork lifts in the building. These lifts were all electric and I don’t think any of us new employees knew how to operate a forklift. Our supervisor, Pete was his name, gathered the receiving staff together to show us how to used these lifts. He was explaining all the controls and talking about safety. The lifts that we would be using in receiving were all sit down lifts; you sit down to operate them. He had the group to stand back as he raised the forks on one of the sit-down lifts about ten feet high. Pete was instructing us to never walk under raised forks, with or without a load on them, when suddenly the raised forks fell to the floor.
Now the forks falling was an accident, but it got all our attention, and we understood why we should not walk under raised forks. They did pull the key from that lift and got the forklift people out to repair that lift and check all the lifts before we could use them.
Olden day memories, why can I remember the olden days and not remember where I put my car keys yesterday?
That is it for now, I need a second cup of coffee, hope you have a good day!
Always think safety!
Senior retired fork lift operator and unloader of trucks, Don the Ford
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