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Hello all, from Warehouse and Operations as a Career, the Podcast where we talk about Warehousing and Transportation and the many different positions, equipment and opportunities to be found with a Career in Operations.  I’m Marty T Hawkins and I love Op’s, I’ve had the privilege of working with and beside some of the best individuals and teams in the business for over 40 years.  Each week we here at WAOC try and share some of our experiences, interview those performing the tasks and answer your questions on any topics or comments sent into us.  Shoot us a message to [email protected] and we’ll have an opinion or find you an answer to your thought, topic or suggestion!  If you enjoy the social scenes we can be found using @whseandops on both Facebook and Twitter, and for you equipment operators, we can usually be found hanging out in the Warehouse Equipment Operators Community Group in Facebook thru-out the week as well!

So lets see, I’ve written down a lot of bullet points for this week but don’t really have anything  planned to talk about in particular…I see I’ve written down that we’re in week 49 of the year.  Gosh, can you believe 2018’s almost over?  Here’s a question, let’s see, it was sent in about two weeks ago, he had a few questions about two wheelers.  The gentleman had just switched positions, looks like he’d been working as a Loader for a large foodservice distributor for about 6 months and accepted a driver helper position.  He’d asked if I’ve ever used one and what kind I preferred.  I don’t remember the episode number but back in March of 2017 we did a short episode on the Driver Helper Position and in June last year we had a show on the two-wheeler, I think it was called Op’s most Go To piece of equipment.  Check them out, I think we covered the topics pretty well, at least we had a lot of fun with’em.

Anyway, so to answer his question, yes, I’ve used several, way too many times.  I prefer the ones made out of magnesium and aluminum, I don’t usually mention specific brands, but I really like the Magliner myself.  If you’re buying your own don’t go cheap.  It’s a tool you’re going to be using for work and earning money with, go ahead and spend the money and get what you really need.  Now you can spend between $200 and upwards of $500 on a good one.  You’ll want to get the proper wheels for your work conditions, the correct blade or scoop for the loads you’ll be carrying and attachments, today there’s all kinds of attachments, extenders, different handle designs, everything can be customized.  There’s also some really good breakdowns, you can really move some freight with the right dolly.  I know some delivery drivers that have as many as 5 different kinds with them every day.  One driver helper, I’d call him a professional driver helper that has a custom ordered one he paid over $600 for.  He ordered it with custom wheels, grooved tires, had a hand brake kit put on it, with an extended blade and custom loop handle on it.  Again, I’d suggest you get what you really need, like our shoes and boots, In my opinion we need the right tools and we need to be comfortable to do our best work right?

Speaking of shoes and boots, if your job or facility requires you to wear steel toes or composite caped footwear, get a good pair when you can afford them.  The cheaper brands are fine to start out with, but I’d strongly urge you to get a well-built pair when you can afford a little luxury.  They’ll make a huge difference in your arch area, especially when you’re standing and moving around all day.  As for boots, go with some ankle support.  They look uncomfortable, but if you’re around pallets a lot, say like order selecting in a productivity setting, their perfect, another opinion I guess, no we’ll call that experience, they’ve saved my ankles a hundred times!

I have a note here about dock plates, so keeping with the theme, I guess we’ll call it the tools we use, lets talk about those for a minute.  The gentleman I was speaking with when I made the notation was pointing out how their new dock door system would not let him operate the electric dock plate until the door was fully raised and he didn’t like that.  His job was to place any shorts or items that had been left off the trailer earlier in the shift but before the trailer dispatched.  With the new system the trailer locks had to be engaged, the electric dock door raised all the way up before the dock plate would come up providing access to the load.  The old way, manual doors and dock plates were twice as fast, and he could get things loaded out much faster.  Anyone have a horror story about the old chain pulled hydraulic dock plates?  I’ve seen 3 fingers almost pulled off and heard about one being ripped from a man’s hand. you know how we use to have to grab that iron ring and give it a good hard yank to get it to pop the release on the hydraulic chamber, releasing the plate to come flying up and then we’d take off running up the plate so the lip would catch the edge of the trailer when it came down.  And oh my gosh, anyone ever work with a drop-in dock plate, you know one of those used for bridging the space between the dock and the rail car door.  I’ve mashed my fingers several times and again heard about people loosing one or two trying to position them.  You know, most of the improvements I’ve seen over the last few years do take a little more time I guess but I think we’d all agree they remedy an unsafe situation.  I stood there with him and we timed it, it took 8 seconds for the door to raise.  Yep, we could probably sling the door up a few seconds quicker but then we’d have to make sure the dock lock was engaged with the ICC bar and then raise the ramp.  I bet all in the new system is faster, it just seems slower because we’re standing still, we don’t have all those other things to do anymore.  I like things and systems that make me safer.

How many of us are required to wear PPE’s or personal protective equipment?  Some people consider our footwear as a ppe, personally anytime I’m walking around pallets I just consider it common sense.  I guess most ppe’s can be related to common sense though right?  I like having a high visibility ansi 3 vest on when I’m out walking the floor around equipment, especially if I’m going to be out on the front docks or in the aisles.  Remember in a recent episode we learned how 42% of warehouse accidents happen up by the docks!  I hear every summer from someone that says their light weight mesh vest is too hot to wear?  And eyewear, some fork drivers just don’t want to wear them.  I made that mistake a few times.  I mean as a fork operator we’re always looking up, pallets are dusty, our forks are going to knock that dust and particles loose when we’re retrieving a pallet up in reserves.  I hear about 10 or 12 visits to the clinic every year, someone’s gotten something in their eyes.  If you’ve ever had to use an eyewash station you won’t want to have to do it again!  Speaking of pallets, what about sorting pallets?  That’s real work.  I guess the wooden pallet is the most used tool we deal with.  Pine pallets, which I hope you never use for anything, at least not for lifting into the reserves.  Then we have the Grade A or new oak pallets, the B grades with damaged and repaired runners or slats, oh and then the heavy suckers like peco and chep pallets right?  And I guess today we’re seeing a much larger volume of plastic pallets floating around.  I know delivery drivers love’em, there much easier to just stack up over to the side of our trailers.  Of course there much more costly so I’m sure we’re all held accountable for them, someone’s going to accounting for them!  Shoot us an email about your experiences with pallets, I have a hundred stories I could talk about and I’m sure we’d all like to hear about yours too!

So we’re approaching another year, there’s only 3 more weeks in 2018.  With our next few episodes we’ll be reviewing this years goals that we achieved and planning out our 2019 plans and objectives to achieve those 2019 goals.   We’ll probably wrap up the year doing just that here at WAOC.  I’ll reach out to a couple of people that’s achieved a few of their goals, talk about how they planned for them and maybe get them to share a few that were missed with us.  We’ll talk a little on planning, maybe I’ll share a few of my personal ones with the group too!

Well, that’s a wrap for this week, I enjoyed just talking from the hip and I hope I hit upon something you can relate too.  If so please send us an email and we’ll share your story with the group next week!  Until then, please be careful on or with our equipment and tools & use our PPE’s properly!

Marty here with Warehouse and Operations as a Career!  We appreciate you listening in with us today.  Be sure to Subscribe to us on iTunes, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast or your favorite Pod Catcher, it’s free and you won’t have to catch a Facebook post to grab every episode.  It’ll notify you of a new show and you’ll never miss one!  Speaking of Facebook, you can check our feeds there and on twitter using @whseandops, we continue the conversation on both each week and use them for articles and such that we run across every now and then.  Enough of all that lets talk Op’s for a few minutes now!

A good friend sent me an article from CNN.com and said we had to talk about it on a WAOC episode!  You know, what we do in our industry, warehousing and transportation can be so dangerous if we’re not properly trained or don’t think about our Safety at all times.  Many of the tasks are repetitious, we do them day in and day out every day and every week.   When handling freight, even one wrong lift or just twisting wrong can ruin our backs.  Using even the manual pallet jacks can be dangerous.  And through our Powered Industrial Truck training we know how dangerous our equipment can be.  Transportation and Driving, now that’s a whole other story, on the road with 30k to 80K pounds under us.  It takes training, focus and being aware of our surroundings at all times to remain safe.  The CNN story was  https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/23/uk/farmer-killed-forklift-dog-gbr-scli/index.html

about a 70 year old man, we’d have to assume he was very experienced with operating the lift on his farm.  It happened in the UK, in a small farming town in western England.  He had his Jack Russel dog with him that day, it sounded like they always rode together when he was working out in the fields.  The coroner believed the gentleman left the operators compartment, placed the unit in neutral to open a closed gate, walked in front of the lift and the load to open the gate and his dog inadvertently hit the forward lever which geared the lift, crushing his owner between the gate and load.  Something as simple as setting the parking brake may have saved his life.  As we’ve learned from our PIT training, never to get out of the seat without setting the brake and turning off our units!  A split second choice can change our lives, and the lives of our loved ones.

I went on-line looking for some good data on equipment accidents, and to be honest found way too many incidents, so many accidents can be avoided, we just have to stay focused on our jobs and try not to let all the distractions, well distract us.

https://www.lantech.com/blog/pallet-jack-safety-fails-a-serious-problem?region=1

Has a good article on pallet jack safety fail’s, a few links to video’s showing us what not to do and how dangerous those choices can be.  They state that between 2002 and 2016 OSHA reported 56 major injuries occurred involving pallet jacks.  These included 25 fractures, four fatalities and 8 amputations.  Common sense should tell us to never place our feet under or near a load and to watch for pinch points on our fingers when handling the controls.  This article does a good job of pointing out that we are our own worst enemy regarding pallet jack usage, the fun and games are always a blast until someone gets hurt right?

As embarrassed as I am to say it, I actually broke my left arm once operating a tugger.  Not following the preferred work method, I swung my foot around the back of the tovair to unhook a buggy latch and my shoe lace got hung up on the buggy release pulling me off the machine with me landing on my arm and face.  A hard lesson learned to say the least.

https://ohsonline.com/Articles/2013/09/01/Death-by-Forklift-is-Really-the-PITs.aspx tells us that there are roughly 85 forklift fatalities and 34,900 serious injuries each year, with 42% of the forklift fatalities from the operators being crushed by a tipping vehicle as reported by OSHA.  I’ll include this articles URL with todays show notes, as I will all of todays research materials, but you should definitely check this one out, I found it really interesting.  It speaks about an owner of a machinery and training school’s own fatality while producing a forklift training video.  The investigation found the incident to be driver error, driving to fast over rough terrain and not using the seat belt.

As Equipment Operators we all know about the OSHA Standard 29CFR1910.178 and how it came about and its importance and I’m sure, or hope, every country has their own agency and regulation for the proper training of operators.  If your operating any type of machine or a piece of powered Industrial Equipment and have not had any formal training on it I encourage you to ask your immediate supervisor about it.  Please remember to never get on, touch, shoot, even stand next to a piece of equipment if you haven’t been trained and certified on it.  It’s just not worth the dangers to yourself or others.  And here in the States it’s the law and that law can carry some quite hefty penalties too, as it should!

Anyway, I strayed again, so I found this really neat page on OSHA.gov, it’s a search page where you can type in information your looking for on reported accidents. https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/accidentsearch.html

I found a pre-entered report on “walk-behind forklift” that brought up 118 incidents, it’ll give you descriptions and even a detail tab for each one.  https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/accidentsearch.search?sic=&sicgroup=&naics=&acc_description=&acc_abstract=&acc_keyword=%22Walk-Behind%20Forklift%22&inspnr=&fatal=&officetype=&office=&startmonth=&startday=&startyear=&endmonth=&endday=&endyear=&keyword_list=on&p_start=&p_finish=0&p_sort=event_date&p_desc=ASC&p_direction=Next&p_show=20  A few of the listed incidents were:

Employees leg fractured when pallet jack strikes rack

Employee injured when caught between forklift and truck

Employee injured in fall when pallet jack moves

Employees thumb amputated when caught under switchboard

Employees hand amputated when caught by crossbar

Employees ankle fractured when run over by pallet jack

Employees foot crushed in pallet rider accident

Employees foot fractured between power jack and guardrail

All these are just horrible accidents, and so preventable.  As operators its our responsibility, our jobs, to be focused on our tasks and to be aware of our surroundings at all times isn’t it?

Anyway, all this information is available and searchable, it’s all reported by our employers on their OSHA 300 logs each year.  I probably should have reached out to our WAOC friend Joe, I bet he could give us the short version on 300 logs but I found a little info at https://www.industrysafe.com/blog/osha-recordkeeping/what-is-an-osha-300a

It’s pretty informative, I’ve included their link too, so you can check it out.  It tells us The OSHA 300A log is an annual summary of all OSHA recordable incidents at each business location. The OSHA 300A log of the previous year’s incidents must be posted for employees to view at each jobsite from February 1 to April 30.

I found some more info at https://www.safetyservicescompany.com/topic/osha/fill-osha-injury-reporting-forms-300-300a-301/ it’s really informative as well.

Simply put the form 300 is a report of work-related injuries and illnesses.  It’s very comprehensive and should list everything according to the published guidelines.

Part of the process is filling out the form 301, injury and illness incident report within 7 calendar days of the occurrence.  This information is then used to fill out and file the 300 logs.

We talked about the importance of our Supervisors accident or incident investigation reporting, how important that witness statements, a statement from the employee and a Supervisors report are to our HR departments several times.  This information is used to help compile these reports and logs.

The bottom line is we, as employees, need to be careful, focused, and use our training at all times.  We’re responsible for following all the safety practices and procedures of our employers and the OSHA standards.  They were written for our protections and they will help keep us safe.  We just need to be following them!

Please don’t take all this as sounding negative towards being an equipment operator. These positions are all great careers, I’ve been tasked with everyone of them and loved the positions.  All I’m saying is to remember that they can be dangerous, we need to stay sharp and focused on them.  It’s a job, our jobs and Safety is our first task at hand.  I guess you could say Equipment doesn’t hurt people, people do!

Well there’s a little information on where we can learn a little about the history and stats on accidents in our industry.  If you have any questions, comments or topics you’d like us to look into for you just shoot us an email to [email protected], I’d love to get back to you with an answer!

Thanks again for listening in, have a prosperous and Safe week ahead.  Please think safe, be safe and work safe, we have others waiting at home for our safe return each day!

So it’s week 47 of 2018, and I appreciate you taking the time to listen in to us here at Warehouse and Operations as a Career!  I’m Marty T Hawkins and I we try and bring you some useful and interesting information each week, at least maybe provoking a thought or two that’ll help you with your careers and career planning.  We try and share our experiences and love hearing about yours as well.  Please take a moment to email us, [email protected] if you have any questions, comments or topics you’d like us to look into for ya.

Ok, lets see, so this week I’ve had the opportunity to work with recruiting. Don’t know how much help I’ve been but I’ve lended a hand with placing ads or positions to the different job boards, and social media postings, I even helped with a Job Fair!  You know recruiting is where it all starts for us as applicants, I had a lot of fun and really enjoyed helping to pair great employees with just the right companies and putting people to work, and getting them started, or at least seeing that they have the opportunity to turn those jobs into long lasting careers.  I have no problem sharing with you that I find recruiting to be one of the most stressful and challenging jobs I’ve had to do throughout the years.  As a warehouse manager I use to interview any order selectors, fork lift operators, sanitation, really for all the positions under my watch.  Our HR generalist did a pretty good job pre-screening the applicants for us but then I had to determine if the position was going to be a good fit for the job and that the company and task was going to match the applicants needs too.  I want to feel like I made some good decisions, more than a few of my hires went on to become supervisors, managers, directors and even several Vice Presidents within the corporations!  I had to learn the hard way, more often than not I went with the old gut feeling.  If the prospect knew the terminology, could convince me he or she knew what they were doing they’d end up getting a chance.  Throughout the years I’ve been fortunate enough to hire several hundred individuals, many took the job and worked it into a long term career, a lot of them are still friends of mine today!

Today’s recruiters have so much more insight into our lives, personalities and our work histories, things move at a much quicker pace.  It takes only minutes to check with our work references, back ground checks are all but immediate, some drug screenings are instant.  And don’t even get me started again on our Social Media profiles, we’ve talked about our profiles several times on other episodes, and each recruiter we’ve had as a guest on the show has urged us to make sure they depict the personality and life styles we want them to see.  It’s almost a guarantee that our hiring agent is heading straight to our social pages as soon as our telephone interview is wrapped up.

Anyway, I love recruiting, I wish I was better at it, I guess I’m real comfortable with the sourcing, reviewing the resumes, and I really like both the phone interview and face to face interviewing but man, theres a lot more paperwork involved now than back in my day.  Now I get to help out every once and a while, like this week, and that gives me my fix for another 6 months or so.

So I’ll share a few of my wins and losses I had this week with ya!  One win was with a gentleman who’d only been employed with this company for about 2 months, I’d met him earlier, while he was interviewing for the position and really liked him.  The recruiter that was hiring him had asked me to look over his resume and work history for her, he’d listed a lot of warehouse experience and she wasn’t sure it was all legit. I spent maybe 3 minutes with him and concluded he was a pure Op’s guy and wished him luck.  She hired him and her customer really liked him, he was rocking it over on his docks.  As can happen though, one of his facilities big orders was hung up in transit and they we’re going to have a 2 to 3 week layoff until the order could come in, and him being the last hired it looked like he’d be the one to get the news.  The gentleman had taken one of my cards, and a WAOC card as well, anyway he reached out to myself as well as the recruiter he’d worked with before.  We both knew of another position hiring this week and I’m happy to say he started Tuesday, only missing 1 day of earnings!  He never presented anything negative, he reached out for some help and she was able to find him something that was even closer to his home and at the same pay rate.  I think its even a better opportunity for growth too.  We’ll stay in contact with him, who knows, maybe I could reach out to him in about 6 months and get him to share his success story with us on an episode!

Here’s one that left me shaking my head.  I’ve actually done a little digging on the history of this gentleman, but I haven’t found anything too far out of the ordinary, I still don’t know what happened.  So a recruiter said she had a gentleman on the phone and that he was upset and asked if I’d like to speak with him.  I answered, introduced myself and he said “are you going to give me a job”.  I had pulled up his information, by the way, for anyone that doesn’t know, Staffing agencies, any employer actually, keep an employee file on every associate they’ve hired.  It’ll contain information like our hire dates, dependent information, our interview sheets as well as all our placement’s, how long we worked at each one, any corrective actions we may have had and reasons for our departure.  A lot of this information is good for things like employment verifications for apartments or when we’re purchasing a car and of course when we’re looking for employment later on or again.  So I asked the gentleman what’s he been doing for the last 14 months, you know what type of work.  He’d been a General Labor and Utility with them previously and I was wondering if he’d been exposed to any equipment or maybe different positions recently.  His answer was “that doesn’t matter, I didn’t need to know if he’d been working anywhere, was I going to give him a job”.  I started to explain I’d like to understand what all he’s qualified to do so I could check the open orders for a good fit.  Well about half way through my thought the applicant started cussing at me and hung up?  Of course, if you know me at all, I had to do a little digging, wondering what could have been done a little differently or produced a better outcome here.  I think the core issue could have been, you probably guessed it, my favorite word, Communication.  The candidate had been placed at 3 facilities over a period of about a year and a half.  The first two he’d been reassigned due to attendance problems.  I think the young man had some car problems, they were legit and certainly understandable, things like that are going to happen.  The third time there appeared to be some notes about a family component, maybe a girlfriend issue, anyway again he’d been dismissed due to attendance.  From what I could tell the gentleman had called twice before and his recruiter had asked about his transportation opportunities and had made a note that he had resolved everything and had some good dependable transportation now.  She explained that she didn’t have any G/L positions right now but that she’d give him a call when something came in, that she received new orders weekly.  It looks like he called back the next day and got a different recruiter and was told the same thing.  I certainly understand the frustration, the gentleman needs a job, he needs some income.  When your told I’ll give you a call as soon as something becomes available, it’s hard not to want to call back and check on it, and I don’t feel there’s anything wrong with that but I think we have to be prepared to hear the same thing without getting frustrated or defensive.  In this case the gentleman had landed with someone that had the resources to have really helped him.  Having direct contact with customers and so many Op’s guys in the field sometimes I can make a few calls, even with no open position, when I’ve found someone that’d be a perfect fit with an organization, I can occasionally get them an interview anyway.  Now don’t get me wrong, the gentlemen didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t mind his vulgarities, I know he was just very frustrated, he needed a job right then.  I don’t know if I would have been able to help him at all but now we’ll never know!

Here’s one that really bothered me.  Two gentlemen were having words on a loading dock, those words lead to one man hitting the other one.  Both men were dismissed and lost their jobs.  Workplace violence is a real issue and today there’s no company that’s going to tolerate it.  There’s absolutely no reason for anyone to touch another person in the workplace. During the investigation I found that the supervisor on the floor determined that the employee that was on the receiving end of the punch had really restrained himself, and had tried to defuse the situation.  He wanted to have kept him on but felt like he’d contributed to the mouthing off and talking smack just as much as the other individual.  His decision was to let them both go.

I spoke with this individual, the employee that got hit, expressing that the proper action would have been to report the problem as soon as it started to his supervisor.  He understood what I was saying but didn’t feel like he should have been terminated, in his eyes it wasn’t his fault. I certainly see his side but the bottom line is he was, and like it or not, there is no grey area with workplace violence.  The fact that he had joined in and argued with the other employee were actually grounds for termination at this facility.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that he can’t be placed again, I think he did the right thing coming to his hiring agency and sharing his side of things.  There will of course be an investigation and based on what all I’ve heard so far I’m sure he’ll find another position pretty quickly.  We’ve spoke about work place violence on a couple of different episodes, please don’t get involved in these situations.  The police could have actually been called, the other guy could have found himself with an assault charge even.

And one of my favorite experiences this week, shouldn’t say favorite I guess because I really enjoyed talking with everyone all week long but this one made me feel good.  So a person applied for a G/L position, had a resume which listed a little unloading and sanitation experience, sailed through the phone interview and was asked to come in for an in person visit.  Talk about super excited, he’d just moved to the area 2 weeks ago, gotten the family settled in and started his job search using the different Facebook job’s groups.  One of the first he saw was for an unloader, so he applied.  While speaking with him, we talked about his last two positions in detail, or I thought we had. I asked if he had ever thought about getting some equipment training or had any plans for learning more about warehousing and advancement.  He said certainly, after all working is about making money.  He went on to say that he had about 4 years on a Toyota sit-down counterbalance lift, and about 2 years driving a standup lift and about a year using a slip-sheet attachment on it.  I was a little wow’ed with his experience and asked why he hadn’t added any of that to his resume?  He said he thought since he was applying for a G/L position he needed to show that he’d done that before.  You know, as true as that thought was, I mean, If he had only written his equipment experiences and replied with that, who knows, he might not have been called in for the interview.  The day before there were no operator positions.  Although I see the logic and can appreciate that he was just wanting to get his foot in the door somewhere I think we should list all our accomplishments, always!  Maybe add that we’re willing to start out doing something else, but I’d add everything.  Possibly the phone interview is the place to bring up more about our experiences, I think its fine to list everything, but the important thing is to communicate our experiences, plan and goals to the hiring agent! Anyway, I was able to help place him as a forklift driver making 26% more than the position he’d walked in the door for.

What I learned this week was that Recruiters are there to help us, to place us in positions we can succeed at.  It’s in their interest to fill those jobs for their companies.  As we’ve discussed here at WAOC it’s our responsibility to be honest, respectable, prepared and ready to talk with them.  We have such a short window to get so many points across.  I could tell who had prepared for the interview and who just came to an interview.

Getting a job is one part of our struggle and the more important part is keeping it, turning it into our career.  Remember, as our buddy Joe expresses to us all too often, that it’s called work for a reason.  It’s so important to keep our minds on the job when we’re there.  If we’re doing that, we won’t be talking smack with or about anybody.  Things to argue about won’t come up.  If we’re doing our job we can’t get into any trouble, we’ll only succeed.

Well that’s my week, I hope you’ve had a great week as well.  It’s a Holiday week for us here in the states, time for family and friends.  Shoot us an email to [email protected] and share your week with the group!  Until next week, Happy Thanksgiving and have a Safe week ahead!

It’s been another great week here at Warehouse and Operations as a Career, I hope everyone’s had a safe and prosperous one as well?  I’m Marty, I’ve been out on the road the last two weeks so I’m grooving on getting caught up and settled in myself.  It’s cold here in Texas, it seems a little early for us to be seeing these temperatures here.  All week I’ve been getting comments about the snow showing up early in Illinois and Denver, I just heard Pennsylvania has seen some of the nasty stuff this week too.  I say nasty not because it’s not beautiful and it does help kill a lot of those pesky flying critters, but it can make for some treacherous driving situations and plays havoc on our industry’s routing and delivery schedules!  Doe’s any of your facilities do any kind of cold stress training or talk about the need to take care of our muscles this time of year?  Joe did a really good presentation just about this time last year and I believe he’s already got one scheduled for next month to broadcast to his group of Sup’s and Managers.  Maybe that could be the first thing we could put up on our You Tube Channel, let me see what he thinks about it!  When I think about Cold Stress I always remember my start up meetings as a selector.  We’d do some short exercises to warm up our muscles, maybe some arm and leg stretches, something simple like that.  Most of us would do them again after breaks and lunches, I don’t know if there’s really any medical benefits but it did make me feel better and I never had any muscle problems at all in the winter.  OSHA has a pretty good page on Cold Stress, I’ll add it in todays show notes, https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/emergencypreparedness/guides/cold.html  I think you’ll find it really informative.  Most Cold Stress meetings I’ve attended brings up the safety aspect, things like:

How contributing factors can include Diabetes and Hypertension, being out of shape or in poor physical health.  You know the wetness and dampness and not dressing properly can be a serious issue and really contribute to our bodies suffering from cold stress.

Cold Stress as stated by  https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/cold+stress occurs at temperature less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) varying with chill factor, wetness, protection from wind.

Everything I found on the internet kept referring me to the word Hyperthermia, so I checked that out on Wikipedia.org, there I found all the cautions I’d been taught before!  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia  .  Your management team should be teaching you the signs and preventions, but it never hurts to do a little self-education on our own Safety needs right.  A few of the mild symptoms to be aware of could be shivering, maybe our heart rate increasing, maybe a faster respiratory rate and even some mental confusion.  A moderate level of hyperthermia can increase our mental confusion, muscle miss-coordination will become apparent to us too.  We could notice our ears, lips, fingers and toes turning a bit blue as our blood vessels constrict to keep our internal organs warm.

And severe hyperthermia can present with sluggish thinking, slurred speech and even amnesia.  It’s important we remember to stay hydrated in the winter and that alcohol can actually add to our loss of body heat.

I worked in a Freezer for about 6 years, I was always dressed properly with my freezer gear, but I did see a few order selectors and lift drivers deal with mild cases of cold stress.  Again, it’s really all about doing what we’ve been taught and using a little common sense.  If your supervisor hasn’t brought up anything about winter safety yet hit them up with your knowledge of cold stress and hyperthermia, a great safety topic to get you noticed!  A few other things you could mention is to be cautious with any outside stairs and hand rails, I hate those metal steps coming in from the transportation yard.  A little mist or freezing rain and snow is the perfect recipe for a fall.  Mention having a box a de-ice around, it’s super inexpensive and comes in handy when you need it.  Even here in Texas, where we only see icy conditions a few hours a year it’ll save someone from falling coming into the building on that 1 morning a year!

Well as good a topic as cold weather is, I was wanting to share a thought from one of our listeners last week.  He didn’t mind me sharing his story, but he didn’t want to talk about it on the show.  I’ll call him Jeff, remember our fictional character from our first few WAOC episodes?  Well Jeff is 23 years old, he’s looking for his 9th job since graduating high school.  Jeff’s been following the show and disagreed with my thoughts on goal setting, planning and how I believed any of us could earn $5000 more dollars in a year if we just decided too.  We had a great talk and ended up just agreeing to disagree though, but I am excited about having a new friend in the industry.  Anyway, Jeff’s been a forklift operator for about 2 years, a year and a half on a counterbalance and almost 6 months using a stand-up reach lift.  His complaint was that he’s always passed over for promotions or getting to move from one job task into another one that would pay him a little more.  I asked him about his attendance record and how was his tardies and if he ever contributed to the daily pre-shift meeting or safety meetings.  I went on the ask him about his job, what all it entailed and how the freight moved throughout his warehouse, a few questions about his equipment, just a lot of things like that.  Jeff’s point was that he’s an employee and should be compensated for what he does, and that all that team participation and knowledge stuff shouldn’t matter.  Jeff seemed a little surprised when I wholeheartedly agreed with his statement.  I pointed out that he was being paid for the job that he was doing, and only being paid for the job that he was doing.  I believe every job in the warehouse is a great career choice.  I know fork operators that’s been doing it for 10 plus years, they love operating a lift and plan on retiring from that job.  It’s giving them all that they want.  They’ve reached their goal and I think that’s a great thing.  But I pointed out to Jeff that it seems he’s wanting something else, so we explored that for a bit.  Jeff stated that his goal was to earn more money.  He felt his next job should pay him more than his last position did because he was more experienced now.  Jeff hadn’t decided what industry to apply too, or what benefits they may be offering and wasn’t concerned what, if any, advancement opportunities his new employer could offer up.  He only knew he wanted to drive a lift and make more than he did at his last job.  As we’ve discussed many times here at WAOC, we, as employees, especially in todays work environments, have to own some of these responsibilities ourselves.  Our industry is the greatest there is, I mean really, without a college education, or any special schooling at all, just by working hard and doing a little self-education along the way we can retire from operations earning over a $100,000 a year.  Yes, it’s going to be hard work, we have to be responsible and loyal to the industry, but that’s required with any Career!  Back in October, in episode 108 we talked about how everything we accomplish is about choices.  I really do believe that we control our careers and will get out of them exactly what we put into them.  Like I mentioned, I’ve been traveling and had an opportunity to read a book by Cindy Brown while I was flying, you may remember her, I mention her Podcast Unlocking the Secret to Living Rich from time to time, anyway her new book is called Pragmatic Prosperity – The Art of Living Rich.  She shares several thoughts or techniques that I believe us as employees can prosper from in our daily lives as well as teaching us how to become wealthy to boot!  No, I’m not affiliated with it in any way, I just think it’s a great book, it’s .99 on Amazon kindle right now, you ought to check it out, you’ll be richer from reading it!  Speaking of affiliates, last week I was asked 3 or 4 times if WAOC was affiliated or being sponsored by the equipment manufacturers I mention every so often, Nope, no affiliation right now with any one or any company at all.  We like sharing our opinions and experiences too much, I wouldn’t do well having to speak to someone else’s thoughts or ideas.  I do try and post links to any articles or websites I mention though, primarily so you can go read something interesting.

Boy, I strayed way off topic this time didn’t I!  Where was I going with all this, oh yeah, But I do believe we control our careers.  It’s the choices we make, good and bad, sometimes the bad ones are necessary for what’s going on in our lives at the time but it’s our choices that takes us where we’re going.  Back to Jeff’s points for a minute.  If we’re tardy too often or take too many days off, we’re just being that average employee, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.  I know Managers are cringing right now but really the average employee in the workforce believes that’s fine, and really it is.  Being average will earn us X number of dollars an hour, and as long as we don’t go over that average number of days off or tardies and hit our average numbers we’ll keep those jobs.  An average employee punches in, completes his or her shift, punches out and never thinks of the job or career again until the next day when its time to punch back in.  As Jeff mentioned, that’s an employee getting paid for what he or she does.  As we’ve talked about before, those with more experiences and more knowledge earn more money.  That’s just a fact.  As you know I believe if we want to earn more, we just have to let our management team know that and let them see that through our actions.  Communication and participating is going to show them we want more and their going to need us, maybe even to take their place so they can move up to the next spot themselves.  As for earning $5000 more dollars this year, it’s a given, if we’re THAT employee our extra over time alone that our manager will need from us will get us there.  And that 5k is only $2.40 more an hour over the year, being that employee will earn us those promotions or the movement between departments or task to earn us that much easily.  I’ve always tried not to get hung up on the hourly wage, use your tax filings each year as a metric, here in the States that’ll be our W2, you’re probably achieving more that the 5k annually already.  If not, I assure you that you can, and it is really up to you!  I’m looking forward to more talks with my new friend in the coming months.  He’s agreed to check in with me every few weeks and I’m going to see if I can help him with getting noticed and maybe getting those increases that he’s chasing.  I’m looking forward to working with him.  And if you have any questions about getting noticed or just want to vent a little about a situation, shoot us a email to [email protected] we’d be happy to help or offer up some experiences or a few fact based opinions on just about any subject you shoot to us!  Well we only have 6 weeks left in 2018, it’s about time to start reflecting on the goals we reached this year and planning out those 2019 ideas, if you haven’t started tossing them around yet it’s time ladies and gentlemen, be sure to start putting something on paper!

Well Thanks for listening in again today, have a great week ahead and Be Safe, get noticed by your management team, and share some of your knowledge with the new guy, especially the safety stuff!

Welcome back and thanks for checking in with us, I’m Marty and you’ve chosen to listen in to Warehouse and Operations as a Career today and we very much appreciate your time!  I’m in Las Vegas, Nevada this week, doing a pre site Safety walk at a new facility.  I really enjoy having the opportunity to meet with new customers and all their associates.  It’s a quite large facility, about 500k sq ft building, a production warehouse actually.  I probably spend more time in Distribution Centers, I’ve always felt the production side of our industry is a great place work though, I actually think it’s the perfect environment to get started with, and they can offer us some great and long lasting careers too!

I’ve done a little research on a few pieces of equipment that I’d like to talk about today.  You’ll typically see all the standard material handling or powered industrial equipment in both production and distribution centers.  Pallet jacks, stand up lifts, reach forks and the counterbalance lifts moving freight across the docks.  I seem to see the more specialized units or trucks around production facilities so let’s look at a couple. I’ll put a few URL’s in today’s show notes in case you’d like to check’em out, maybe learn a little more about their uses.  Hey, what’d ya’ll think about us making a WAOC YouTube channel so we could share some pics and slides of the things we discuss, maybe we wouldn’t use it weekly but it could be another avenue for us to learn with?  Send us an email to [email protected], let me know if that’s something you’d like to see. Maybe I could learn a little about video!

Let’s talk about the Order Picker for a minute.  Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been asked about them 4 times so let’s learn a little about them!  I was talking with an order selector a few weeks ago, he had found himself a great job as an order selector, he’d been looking for a while and was just recently hired on.  He’d wanted a productivity position with a triple rider jack and he’d found it and was loving it!  Just before this position landed in his lap he had accepted an order picker position only to find on his first night that the recruiter had been talking about a piece of equipment instead of a position.  Listening to his story I thought I’d bust my spleen laughing so hard.  He’d gone in, went through 2 hours of orientation and was taken out to the floor where he found out he’d be operating an actual order picker.  What made the story so funny was listening to him talk about how afraid of heights he was and his panic attack he experienced when he stepped on the platform of the lift.  I’ve heard the Order Picker called a cherry picker, a hi/lo, a platform truck and a high rise truck and I’m sure there’s several other names used for it.  If you go to the https://www.raymondcorp.com/lift-trucks/orderpickers to purchase what we old high rise selectors call a cherry picker you’ll find it listed as an order picker.  Same thing with Crown Equipment,  https://www.crown.com/en-us/forklifts/sp-stockpicker.html  you’ll be looking for an order picker.  You all know Joe, our WAOC Safety expert, when I want to upset him I’ll just call an order picker a cherry picker.  I work with a lot of Recruiters through the many different job boards across the nation and I’ve decided what we call equipment is very much a regional thing.  And of course, we as employees tend to use the phrases that our management uses, and I think they may just be carrying on traditions with what they were taught to call them!

We can checkout https://raymondhandling.com/dictionary/order-pickers/   for a great definition of the order picker.  Basically it is a unit where we stand on the operators platform with a set of forks behind the driving compartment used to attach a pallet for us to place cases, units or pieces of our orders on during selection.  Its used in narrow aisle situations with many pick locations where several SKU’s or small products are carried or stored by our company.  Some order pickers can take us as high as 32 feet to perform our task.  I’ve mentioned before this was one of the first powered industrial trucks I drove, I loved my Cherry picker truck back in the high rise department I started in.  I know Joe’s wrenching right now that I said it that way.  And I’ve got to admit I was surprised to learn that an actual cherry picker, if you went to buy one today, or entered it into our Google search bar would be what I always called a boom lift.  Going back to https://raymondhandling.com/dictionary/order-pickers/ we’ll learn that the name came from one of its first uses was for picking fruit, not just cherries, from the higher branches.  With it having a platform or cage that we can be raised with while controlling where we want to go it was perfect for working out in the fields.  I see them being used more these days by the maintenance department for building racking, installing in-rack sprinkler systems and changing light bulbs in the warehouses.

Speaking of our maintenance departments, another typical lift we could find in our warehouse would be the scissor lift.  Check out https://raymondhandling.com/dictionary/scissor-lift/ It’s just a platform, with rails on all sides, I guess you could call it a cage, where again we as operators are taken to where the work is.  One difference with this piece of equipment is that it’s built to go straight up and down.  It’s a very narrow truck, not really built for balance.  Our Safety practices actually forbid it being moved forward or backward while raised.

Oh, and I almost forgot about one of my favorite pieces of equipment, the turret truck.  It’s the one piece of warehousing equipment or lift that I’m not certified on.  I want to operate one so bad!  So back to https://raymondhandling.com/dictionary/turret-trucks/ we go.  We’ve been talking about platform trucks that raise us up to the tasks but we as selectors or employees are kind of manually performing the tasks.  A turret truck is actually a forklift that we’re riding up with the forks.  It has an articulating carriage allowing the forks to rotate 180 degrees within the aisle with us.  This baby is for use in very narrow aisles.  The ones I’ve seen can take us up in the carriage to like 40 feet to place or retrieve a pallet.  A wired guidance system is usually used to guide the truck down the aisles so the operator can concentrate and focus on the pallets.  If any of you operate one of these beast shoot us an email to [email protected] and tell us about your experiences with it, I’d be so jealous to hear about it!

All four of these pieces of equipment fall under the term AWP, or aerial work platform.  I’ve sometimes heard the term EWP or elevated work platform.  If we check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_work_platform we’ll find it states an aerial work platform (AWP), also known as an aerial device, elevating work platform (EWP), bucket truck or mobile elevating work platform (MEWP) is a mechanical device used to provide temporary access for people or equipment to inaccessible areas, usually at height. There are distinct types of mechanized access platforms.  I found their definition pretty interesting, you should check out the whole thing, there’s several really good links within it too.

Of course anytime our feet leaves the ground we should, or I hope we do, think of our Safety and the Safety of others.  Many years ago all I wore regarding PPE’s to work from my old cherry picker in the high rise department was a safety belt.  Every time I’d step in the platform I’d put on my belt which stayed attached to a lanyard which was affixed to the headache bar on the truck.  We used to joke, it wouldn’t have ever really been funny had we stepped off the platform or pallet, but we’d joke around how after free falling for 4 feet until our straight and unforgiving lanyards caught us, how that belt would end up yanking all our organs out.  A few years later the full body harnesses came out with retractable lanyards which offered us much better fall protection.  And here’s a great opportunity for me to mention my favorite Safety procedure, awe come on, you knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to again state to never get on or operate any type of powered industrial truck or machine of any kind without being properly trained and certified to do so.  Our 29cfr1910.178 training teaches us that right.  And as always I’ll add it’s link to todays show notes, it has a great search field on the page where you can check out just about anything covered within the regulation or standard! https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owalink.query_links?src_doc_type=INTERPRETATIONS&src_unique_file=I20000410A&src_anchor_name=1910.178(l)(2)(ii)

I strayed a little off topic again but it never hurts to bring up safety, it is our Priority One right?

Distribution Centers use to utilize order pickers quite a bit but now I think I’m seeing them more practical for production facilities.  DC’s seem to be going to the mechanical options like product carousels, mini loads and conveyor systems, even robots for their small wares or lighter, more uniformed products.  As I mentioned I work with several recruiters, many whom has never had the opportunity to see a lot of the equipment we work with and I always suggest them checking out equipment on you tube before they interview an operator.  If your new to the industry and think you’d like to become an equipment operator you should check out my friend’s channel.  Just look up Raymond Harlall on you tube, he’s got several videos on the operation of all types of equipment.  He has a great one on the order picker! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k01FC9JRgC8

Well, I hope we helped define a few pieces of equipment for you today.  If your facility doesn’t train you to the reg 29cfr1910.178 please mention it to your boss, he or she may just not be aware of it.  It’ll get you noticed in a good way and keep you and your co-workers a bit safer.  Until next week, please think safe & be safe, both at work and at home!