Screw Baselines and Redefine Safety: Safety Tales Podcast Episode 11

Intro Speaker:

Dave and Bacon's Safety Tales, the only industrial safety podcast that brings you common sense advice on job site safety, standards, regulations, and industry best practices without putting you to sleep. 

Fred:

Welcome to Dave and Bacon's Safety Tales. It looks like you made it back. We just be keeping alive ... Aww, I butchered it. We must be keeping all our listeners alive. 

Dave:

Staying alive. 

Fred:

Alive and well. Damn it. We did hear some Bee Gees this morning. 

Dave:

Oh my god. 

Fred:

You love the Bee Gees. 

Dave:

Oh, I love '70s music just because it was a different time and a place, obviously, but we were cruising around Florida again today and there's a reason that I love living in Blue Grass, Iowa, and that's because I spend no time in traffic. We sat on the ... What was it, the 589? 

Fred:

Good guess. I don't know. 

Dave:

Oh my god, it's like watching paint dry. 

Fred:

Yeah, for one car that had a smashed in bumper, and it was pushed off the side of the road and there was still some glass around, so thoughts and prayers for that person, but it was really delaying us for about 35 minutes. 

Dave:

Everybody has to stop and act like they're, I don't know, reporting on the news or something. I wish everybody would just continue on. 

Fred:

Right, take a peek and move- 

Dave:

Nothing here to see. 

Fred:

Nothing here to see. Move along. Hey, Fred and Dave here, Quad City Safety. We are on LinkedIn, Fred Radunzel and Dave White with Quad City Safety. I'm QCSafetyFred on Twitter. Today, what we're looking to do is take you guys back a little bit to when we were wee little lads. By wee little lads, I mean it could be 10 years ago, but back to our roots. We're going to share some stories from our lives that brought us to this place where safety has become more than passion. It's integrated into everything that we do. Dave, go ahead. 

Dave:

Well, I guess part of what we want to talk about is thoughts as it relates to your parents because your parents give you a lot of thought processes that you go through life with. One of them gets back to my father was in Vietnam and he was subjected to a lot of stuff there. So I guess the whole thing is I keep trying to hammer on these chronic things that happened over time was he was in mine warfare, so he was one of the guys that would either through radio or they would load up in helicopters and drop the messages and tell them, "Hey, Charlie. Surrender. We've got this. You need to just give up, give up, give up." Not to mention being shot at and shooting back, is he was subjected to a lot of Agent Orange in those areas. 

Come blast forward a couple years ago, he died of a heart attack and they called it the widow maker heart attack. One of the things that there's a causal connection between is there's a lot of vets who went through Vietnam who were exposed to some of those compounds and long-term they have a very high PSA score, and it's not uncommon that they die of those types of heart attacks. They think that there's a causal connection about what they were subjected to while fighting in the military and blast forward years. Something that maybe he didn't teach me, but looking back to my dad is that was something that was kind of an eye-opening thing there. 

Fred:

Okay. What experiences, then, in your life, then, gave you the confidence to not settle for somebody else's baseline? 

Dave:

I guess a lot of it was I was always kind of ... My parents did a good job of putting me ... I would say it's a blessing and a curse, but good was never great. Don't accept where you're at now, that there's always more to get. A lot of it was compassion. If you care for people, you will achieve great things. You can't step on the throats of people and expect them to help you get to good things. 

Fred:

Right. A little bit more about your story, then. I would say I know it a little bit, but you came in through finance and yet somehow you ended up being sort of a safety expert in knowing everything there is to know about safety. But you didn't go to school for safety, you just happened to go to a school- 

Dave:

No, my background was accounting but I count that kind of ... It's going to sound weird, but it kind of trained me for it because when you talk about safety there is a lot of standards. Accounting has a lot of rules and standards, so whether it's how do you depreciate a fixed asset or how does compound interest work, there's a lot of math and thought processes in accounting. Well, there's a lot of math and thought processes when you talk about safety. 

For instance, when we talk about a lot of safety things, is I always like to talk about the principle of dose. Like Fred's poor little guy has been throwing up this morning, little sick, so I'm sure that your wife had to administer some acetaminophen or Tylenol to handle that fever. Well, as we all know, when we start looking at it, you have to sit there and go, "Well, the child is from X weight to Y weight, and based on that weight you can give them so many, whether it's tablets, teaspoons, milligrams, whatever, over a period of time." 

So having that accounting background really drives me into understanding those thought processes of dose, so the amount of things that people can be subjected to over time. What they can be subjected to is, let's say we're talking respiratory, it could be ... When you wear a respirator, you're still getting a dose of what you're trying to filter out. You're just trying to keep it below a value that, whether it's a TLV or whether it's parts per million. 

I would say there's basically the lab nerds have gone out there and said, "You know, you can have this much lead. If you get more lead than that, you're going to have some problems with your brain." They figure this stuff out over time. They watch kids eating paint chips over time not do very well in school and it messed up their brains, and finally they went, "Oh, we have a problem with lead," and figured out that you can have a little bit, but where you can't have it so they've written that into the safety standards. 

Fred:

You're going off the rails a little bit. 

Dave:

I'm going way off the rails. I'm sorry. 

Fred:

Back to my original question, you came in to safety to work for a safety company as a finance person. But what ended up giving you the passion actually for safety and not just being the person that helps with the numbers and does that? At some point, you had to be like, "Damn it, this is actually ... I want to build my life around this, and it's important to me." 

Dave:

Well, it's people. I love people, and I want to make sure that people are happy. The rewarding thing mentally is if I do my job correctly and show people safety, show people a way to make it through without being harmed while at work, they get to return to the things that are the most meaningful things in life, which is your family and your free time. 

Fred:

Right, so you saw an opportunity for greater purpose. 

Dave:

Well, I mean, everybody's searching for purpose. Having that purpose that is ... I'm not a doctor so I can't do Doctors Without Borders. I came in and was in finance, but saw a way that it was something that I got, I understand how to explain it, and really had the opportunity to transition out of something that I was doing before into something that has a better purpose. I like training people. I like showing people new things. 

I really like it because of the mental reward that if I do it and I do it good, somebody's going to return home. Somebody's going to be okay. We're not going to deal with the fact that they can't see their kids. Maybe we kept them from getting burned. Anybody that's ever looked at the mental aspects of somebody that's had burns to them, that's something that's catastrophic mentally to somebody. It changes their life from the standpoint of it damages their outward look, but it mentally is something that people can't get over. 

Fred:

Right. My story is a little bit different, obviously. I ended up getting laid off from a sales job. The company, this is back in 2008, 2009. I don't even remember exactly what the year was. Anyway, it was way back. I ended up getting laid off from a sales company that just decided to all of a sudden cut the work force directly in half. I was younger, and the person that was near me was older. They had been with the company longer, so they had priority, more invested in them. So they kept them, and I was out looking for a job. 

A few months go by, and I have a buddy that installs satellite dish for a living. He's very, very good at it. He's got all the skillset. He's done it a million times, and so he's one of those guys that can just go out there, feed out all the cable, throw that dish up, line it up real quick, throw the bolts in, plug it all in, and he's good to go and out of there. 

Well, for a newcomer it takes a bit longer. You don't really figure things out. If you've ever had somebody out at your house and you're like, "God, what is taking so long?" it's probably somebody like me that received a very low level of training and you're out there working. But, digress. There was a day that I was going to get up on a roof. I wore no fall protection doing this job. 

Dave:

Most people don't, do they? 

Fred:

No. No one did. I never saw anyone ... We're at nine, ten years ago. 

Dave:

I think they're starting to really push towards them not putting them on roofs now. 

Fred:

Right. There was one day that I had set up a ladder on the back of the house and it was a serious drop of like a two- or three-story house. I was up there, my ladder fully extended about 28 feet, and all of a sudden, I was by myself and the ladder goes just by itself. I'm up on the roof, and the ladder ... I see that, "No!" as the ladder just falls and crashes on their fence and falls down. 

Now, I'm standing up on the roof with no way to get off the roof. So what I ended up choosing to do eventually ... I didn't have a phone, so what I ended up choosing to do was I walked to the front of the house, which was maybe a 11-foot drop, and I jumped. I jumped, hit the ground, did a barrel roll, and landed and ended up fine. I was fine. My back hurt a little bit, but I was fine. I was able to go pick up my ladder, put it back up, finish the job. 

Dave:

I do not know if I could have got back up on the roof after- 

Fred:

I did it. I got back up there, put it back up, finished the job. Well, fast forward another month later, another ladder. I put the ladder up on like an overhang on the front of somebody's house over a porch. Well, I lean it up on this overhang, because this is right near where I'm going to be hanging the satellite dish, and the overhang gives. The overhang gives out. 

That's what my ladder's balancing on, so all of a sudden I am now on the ladder and the ladder's going down forward. It's not falling backwards where you have a little bit of time. It's going through this overhang. The overhang drops and I go through the overhang, so I'm going down. I fall on the ground, stop myself with my hand, which jams up my elbow, hyper extends my elbow, and my thing still clicks to this day. At that point, it became, "It's time to get out of doing this. I can't do this. I'm going to kill myself." 

Dave:

So you have two ladder incidents. How long were you on the job? 

Fred:

Three months. Three months of doing that, and I finally had to do something different. A little bit of time just working a retail job nights and weekends and I found Quad City Safety. I got in the mix, interviewed, and it became a sales job, and I had no prior knowledge about safety. Indirectly, a safety incident ended up getting me into safety. So obviously, the training aspect of how to properly use your ladder, never had that. Nothing protecting me up on the roof. Other than that, I think about what if I had to work in the wintertime? You slip on some ice on a roof, and all of a sudden I see my ladder going 28 feet off a roof. I don't hear too often about that, but it has to happen out there. 

Dave:

Yeah, you'd think. 

Fred:

Anyway, I started with a safety company working with having no safety knowledge. So through being an okay salesperson, I started developing and was able to get a passion for it. But the conversation that I wanted this to lead into was not everyone ends up in safety because they have a passion for safety. Sometimes it's just a job, like responsibilities get bestowed upon the person in your organization that maybe they know a little something about safety. I didn't know anything about safety, and all of a sudden I have these responsibilities where I'm going in and talking to people about their safety programs. That happens at other places too, where the janitor all of a sudden, "Hey, man. You're pretty good at throwing those sorbents down. I think you know how to do that, so all of a sudden he becomes the safety guy or the human resources person. 

Dave:

Yeah, it's not uncommon for, how to say, maybe not big places, but when we talk about smaller head count is typically management gets their insurance renewal number, knows, "Oh, man. We're starting to pay quite a bit on work comp." Usually that agent will say, "You probably need to get a safety person." So trying to check that box, they just kind of go, to your point there, is typically it's somebody that's been around for a while. Hell, it could be a maintenance guy or it could just be somebody, "Bill's been here for 20 years. He probably knows what's going on, so we'll"- 

Fred:

Right, he knows all our processes and all the stuff that we do. 

Dave:

So they say, "Hey, Bill, here you go. You're our guy." Bill sits there and Bill accepts the position because they threw a little bit of money at him and he's kind of got a title and he's not going to have to crawl up into the machines as much. 

Fred:

Yeah. The fingernails stay clean. 

Dave:

Yeah, he's got a little bit better gig on paper. But then, he sits there and flounders because, while he knows maybe how people have historically got hurt, he may not have the knowledge to know how to fix that or what to look for. 

Fred:

Right, and sometimes these companies can look at it and say, "Well, we checked the box. We hired a safety guy." 

Dave:

Correct. 

Fred:

It's just a different thing that you really got to look at when you're even maybe talking to the safety person at your own company. 

Dave:

But to go back to that, though, Fred, as we keep talking about, safety is a community. 

Fred:

Yeah. 

Dave:

If you're the guy that's listening to this podcast and you're like, "Holy shit, that's who I am," it's nothing to be embarrassed about because whether it's online, whether it's a sales professional like Fred Radunzel, there are people that have been out there studying the stuff that are out there to help. I don't really know of anybody that has a trade secret, special sauce thing that safety ... Like, we have this thing that keeps people so safe that we're going to trademark it and we're not going to share it to anybody. We're going to hide it. 

Fred:

We got the invisible bubble. 

Dave:

Yeah, we got the invisible face shield. It's something that you can't see, but it protects everybody, but we're not going to share it. Yeah, I guess manufacturers may have some patents on products or whatever, but most of the time there's safety solutions out there that- 

Fred:

And those manufacturers want you to have it. They're not hiding it from you. They want you to have it. 

Dave:

They want you to have it and they'll come out ... Hell, they'll train you how to use it. They usually can teach, again, if you don't have that historical knowledge, they can train you up, not just on the product, as they can easily train you up on the hazard or what you should look for. 

Fred:

Cool. I think that was a good convo. 

Dave:

When did this convo ... My kids just started breaking that off. Is that within the last year or two? 

Fred:

I don't know, it's just an abbreviation. Conversation. 

Dave:

Yeah, but convo. 

Fred:

Is it cool? I don't think I'm cool, so maybe I'm cooler. Maybe I can fit in with the high school kids. I don't know. 

Dave:

Maybe so, maybe so. 

Fred:

We'll move on to the dumbass of the week this week. Hit the music, fictional name. Let's call this guy Harvey. 

Dave:

Yeah, Harvey gets up, gets in his truck, heads to the job site, talks to the foreman, foreman wants him to break out one of those industrial-size buzz saws, the one that you can't just go down to Home Depot and get an exchange blade for. So he fires this thing up, and you all see him all summer long. He's cutting this concrete, and there's just a plume of dust coming up. It's to the point that you're driving through the construction zone and you can barely see what the hell is going on. 

Fred:

Yeah, so you open the door and Snoop Dogg's in there. 

Dave:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. The whole thing is, he thinks that he's just doing his job because that's what they've told him. Well, the whole time that he's cutting that concrete he's breathing in silica. So this is kind of a dual-stage dumbass of the week, is, one, Harvey's boss obviously put him in harm's way by asking him to do something that should've been a wet cut, or wearing a respirator to do it, but obviously Harvey's been standing out there cutting it, so he's breathing it in. He's throwing it all over the place, so everybody that's on the job site around him's breathing it in. So we're going to call Harvey our dumbass of the week based on that.

Fred:

Interesting question that comes from that. In Harvey's situation here, he might not have known that this dust was causing this to happen to him, so what can Harvey do? Is that something that ... It can be as simple as if you start feeling kind of crappy while you're doing your job, there might be a reason for it to ask some questions. 

Dave:

It never hurts to ask before you start a task, because Harvey's boss might've known something, but a lot of times a foreman's not there 24 hours a day watching everything that everybody does. 

Fred:

And might assume that Harvey knows to do this.

Dave:

Because in a lot of cases, they just didn't hook up the water line to do that wet cut. Or maybe it's his first day on the job and nobody's paid attention that, hell, maybe he came from a different industry where they didn't have to wear a respirator and not know. The whole thing, as it gets back to, is it's okay to be ignorant. But as a group, we need to see something, say something. We need to have a community of people where we feel that we can have the conversations and share the knowledge or point out that, hey man, you really shouldn't do that. 

It's amazing to me that if people are watching a group of kids, an adult will walk up to a kid and go, "Hey, man. I know you're not my kid, but you probably shouldn't do that." But we won't do that to an adult that's putting themselves in harm's way. So it's not bad to be, how to say, hold yourself accountable. Somebody tells you to go pound sand after you try to tell them, "Hey, don't breathe in that because it's not good for you," that's nothing to feel bad about.

Fred:

It kind of becomes ... It's on them at that point. But yeah, definitely let people know. If you have some education in that area and you see somebody being stupid and reckless with their own health, it's your duty to let them know. 

Dave:

Well, safety has no quitting time. So literally, if you see somebody that doesn't have their seatbelt on that's in the car, "Hey, can you put your seatbelt on?" Maybe somebody's had one too many. Maybe they're getting ready to ... No telling. Maybe it's that dumbass neighbor of yours that doesn't know how to light a barbecue grill, and you see that he's got the gas on and you're going, "Oh, man. This is not going to be good when he finally gets that thing lit," as he's clicking away on a lighter. 

Fred:

Right. Some more to the turkey fryer. 

Dave:

Oh, yeah. He's got his frozen [Sara Lee 00:24:41] turkey, and he's got it and he's set up his turkey fryer right in the middle of the garage and put newspaper down and drops that frozen turkey in, as there's a plume of fire that goes through the roof and has a real shitty holiday. 

Fred:

Harvey's a dumbass, anyways. Let's comb through the email box through this week, ask a few questions. Again, and I say it every week, but please reach out to us with questions, fred@quadcitysafety.com. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Quad City Safety. Reach out to us in any of those ways that you feel comfortable. 

Dave:

There's even a little button on our website that you can hit that you can bang out the question there also. 

Fred:

All right. Number one, who is considered a competent person? Do they have to go through some sort of class? 

Dave:

Realistically, when you look at the word "competent", a competent person is somebody has to be recognized by the employer. The employer kind of has to make a judgment call of what they are going to take as a competent person. A person theoretically could take a competent fault ... Around fault protection, competent comes in there. So you could have a competent inspector, or you could have a competent person.

Let's say if we're looking at the standard it says that, let's say we have harnesses and lanyards and [inaudible 00:26:23] to NC359. On that annual basis we need to inspect, once a year. It means that it needs to be handled by a competent person. Well, competent means that they have to have knowledge about the area, and sometimes that can be a class. They either have to have been somebody that's been around fault protection, or they've taken that class. It's the first part. 

The second part is the employer has to look at them and go, "You are our competent person," so it's kind of a two-step thing. One is they have to have the knowledge or some level of training, and then the second is that they are identified by the employer. Just because somebody may ... Let's say that we have a guy that's been around the job site for 50 years and we think that he knows everything. If he hasn't been deemed the competent person by the employer, he's not technically the competent person. 

Fred:

Okay. Cool. All right, number two. I have waterproof shoes, and I think that my shoes are leaking. Is that common? 

Dave:

More often than not. We saw a lot of insulated boots, and boots can be insulated in a number of ways, and typically, how to say, waterproof insulated. Most of the time, when you are ... Well, a lot of times you'll have just a waterproof boot, but then you'll have waterproof insulated so there's a lot of different things going on. But in waterproof insulated boots, it's not uncommon for there to be a bootie, a Gore Tex bootie. There's a glorified bag in the shoe that keeps your foot dry. Well, the problem is those are usually not permeable membranes, so they're hot. Imagine just sticking your foot in a garbage bag. 

Well, a lot of times they're insulated, so we got our foot in a garbage bag with a blanket on them. Then, we've got our foot in a garbage bag with a blanket on them, and they are running on the treadmill. Well, we're going to produce heat and we're going to produce sweat, so a lot of times what we'll find is people think that they have a leaky waterproof resistant boot that, realistically, the moisture, or the wetness that they perceive to be from the outside of the boot is actually created inside the boot. A lot of times they'll be wearing a cotton sock, so if you're wearing a water resistant proof shoe, whether it's insulated or not, it's usually better to wear some level of a moisture wicking sock so that you don't create and retain that moisture inside the shoe. 

Fred:

That exists out there. I've even seen moisture wicking socks. I know I've seen that a lot in clothing. 

Dave:

They'll be a synthetic. Basically, you're going for something that's not a high- 

Fred:

Wool. 

Dave:

... cotton or wool. 

Fred:

A lot of times in the wintertime people put on wool socks inside there. 

Dave:

Real heavy natural fiber socks will get just way wet, because they just suck everything up, and you really have a bad experience with your feet. 

Fred:

Get some funk down there? 

Dave:

Oh, got to love people's feet. Hey, check this out. I've been in our stores before. It's amazing what people will show you, whether it's a rash or the fact that their second toe on the right foot sticks straight up in the air. 

Fred:

Their toenails are curled around their toes? 

Dave:

Oh, yeah. It's awful. 

Fred:

You see that a lot flying on an airplane today. That's the favorite thing, when somebody- 

Dave:

I'm sure somebody will take their shoes off. 

Fred:

... gets on an airplane, they put their foot across their legs and all of a sudden you see those piggies, stinky ass piggies from sitting around in an airport all day, dangling. 

Dave:

Ugh.

Fred:

You savages. All right, Dave. Question number three. Nobody's wearing fall protection in my neighborhood on a roof that they're working on. There's just flags going up around the roof. Is that okay?

Dave:

From the standpoint that you said in my neighborhood would tell me that it sounds like it's a residential roof. Usually, on a sloped roof, while [inaudible 00:31:14] bounces back and forth on residential roofing and whether they're going to enforce fall protection. So if it was a residential roof and they were trying to ... Which would have a pitch to it ... You're not going to be able to use a flagging or a warning system. That's going to be on a flat roof. So in that case I would say no, but let's dive into ... Let's say that it was up at Casey's or whatever when you were driving to get you a pot from [inaudible 00:31:44] or-

Fred:

Holler at [inaudible 00:31:46]? 

Dave:

Yeah, holler at [inaudible 00:31:48]. Maybe pick up a pack of smokes and a Red Bull or whatever. 

Fred:

A slice of pizza and a six pack of MGDs. 

Dave:

Yeah, whatever it is. Maybe some Corn Nuts and beef jerky. 

Fred:

Swisher Sweets. Go ahead. 

Dave:

Okay, right on. 

Fred:

Let's talk about everything that they sell at Casey's. It'll be fun.

Dave:

You're driving by Casey's and you're looking at that warning system. That is allowable to work on a roof without fall protection with that warning line system. But the warning line system has some requirements. First of all, you have to have the pennant flags, and then you have to have the grabber cones, kind of like you see in traffic situations, the big tall cones or whatever, looper or grabber cones or stanchions, whatever you want to call them. They'll make the even heavier metal stanchions that can withstand what they need to, and the pennant flags.

The first requirement is the pennant flags with the little flags on a string that you see at the carnival or whatever. Usually, it's not those because those are going to be made out of that garbage bag material or whatever. But to have that 500 pounds of tensile strength, usually it'll have a piece of poly rope or something going down it that gives it that tensile strength, because obviously if it's a warning line you don't want a good stiff line to hit it and it break because it's just nothing more than garbage bag material, or poly.

The second part of it is the cones. The cones have to be between ... Usually they're about 39 inches tall because the pennant flags need to not have a lot of deflection. So you can't just hang them up, and you almost want them in a straight line. So a deflection, if you're at 39, you don't really want the deflection to go below 36 or three inches of deflection. The other requirement is the stanchion has to be able to maintain a little bit of force from the top. The caveat there is if all of a sudden there's a stiff wind and you got your pennant flags on there that are acting kind of like a sail, that it just doesn't kind of flop over and then somebody either doesn't see it or doesn't feel it.

The final part of it is best practice would be to have somebody that monitors, because when you got people in there working in and around they may not be paying attention to where the warning flag is, or maybe somebody knocked it over or cut it or whatever and somebody's wheeling material all around or whatever and doesn't see it. You want somebody paying attention to the workers up there so that if they get out of that area, that you let them know.

Fred:

I'm sure they'll see time to time that the guys like us got to reach out here a little bit. Let me take a couple steps. I'm still not super close to the edge, but ...

Dave:

I was a couple months ago watching somebody working on one of the local high schools doing some stuff to the roof, and they had a pennant flag up there. He decided he was on the other side of the pennant flag and was working on kind of the [inaudible 00:35:26] area, kind of hanging over the edge, doing some stuff. I just kind of laughed to myself because it was like, "Okay, man, nobody's paying attention to this."

Fred:

I like guy that does the ... He's real close to the edge, so he puts his ass to the line and then just kinds backs up and pushes it out, so it's like the thing's bowing out two feet. It's like, "I'm still inside the line." So his thing bows out, so definitely ... Somebody should just be like, "Hey, stop it!"

Dave:

Theoretically, that line should be six foot, so he's got probably a little bit of post to move around, but yeah, really shouldn't be crossing that line.

Fred:

Fair enough. That's good. We'll close up the box for today. A little bit earlier, we were talking a little bit about my couple jobs that I got into before I got into safety, so let's have a quick conversation here about some real shit jobs that we had growing up. The first one that comes to mind for me is working in a shoe store. I know we sell shoes, so we have people that work in a shoe store. I don't think we're quite as antiquated as this shoe store was, but it was like they were real big into getting metrics on insoles, and you get this sneaker and you try it on this person and you have to get 35% to purchase an insole and to have an add-on sale.

That was high pressure for just a 20-year-old kid that just wanted to get drunk, make his $10 an hour and want to get drunk. That one stunk. Laying sod is a difficult job to do. They had a machine that they went where they drove with the tractor and the tractor would lay out the sod, and then I'd go out there without gloves on or anything like that and grab the piece of sod and push it into the next piece and just go down the line, pushing every single piece over, and then there's a tree. So you got to cut a ... You get all that sod laid, and then you're cutting a circle around where that tree's at.

Dave:

You got to love when you see sod laid bad, or there's the gaps or whatever, and you have those permanent lines.

Fred:

That's that person that their hands hurt so bad from gripping that sod with their fingers and sliding it over on a summer day from 6:30 in the morning til 5:00 in the afternoon.

Dave:

So you did the big rolls, not just the pieces on a pallet or whatever.

Fred:

Correct. This was mostly doing the big rolls, but we also had to do some of it for different areas. You can't drive something in, so then you got to get the pieces. But yes, this was the big rolls that you lay out and then, like an assembly line, you're sliding down, throwing pieces over, and really grinding and pushing hard. That one sucked.

My least favorite one lasted only one day. I worked at a place that they had go-karts. They were building a new go cart track, so all the groundwork was laid. But what we were doing for the day was the side pieces that keep you on the go-kart track. They had the professionals in there installing, and I was like 18 years old and literally what my job was, was to sit on my ass and he would bolt this thing together and then I would kick the track until it fell into place where he could then bolt the next piece. It was me following him around all day and kicking, with my sneaker, kicking this go-kart track two inches and then sliding down another foot and then kicking it two inches.

Then they told me ... I had a basketball game the next day, and it was, "Hey, you got to come back tomorrow and do it." "Well, I'm not going to be able to make it. I have a basketball game next day." "Well, you got to decide whether or not you want to work here." "Oh, I got to decide whether or not I want to kick a go-kart track for eight hours? I think I'm good, man. Thanks. I'll come back for my $32 that I made today." That was one. What do you got? You got any?

Dave:

Yeah. Probably the worst ones were kind of farm-related. When I was a kid, we always had bucket calves and you always had to mess with them. I caught the bus at like 6:00 in the morning, so I would have to go out before that. It seemed like every other batch one or two of them would get the scours. The scours is basically diarrhea. You've got these cows just shitting on you, and not to mention you got to give them oral medication.

So you're wrestling this cow that's been in a stall, laying in its own shit, and you're trying to get it up. Imagine a big old stick. You would put the pill on the stick, and then you have to grab the little bucket calf by the neck and it's raising hell and wiggling around and you're trying to get this stick down its neck and then hit the pop. You pop the pill, and it makes it swallow. Because you can't walk up to a cow and say, "Will you take this?"

Fred:

Here's a glass of milk. Wash this down.

Dave:

Yeah, not how it works. It would seem like you would come back and you'd just have that barn shit smell on you. That was a nasty ... That was not my favorite.

Fred:

Yeah, I feel like I'd rather kick go-kart tracks.

Dave:

Another nasty one would be busing tables. I worked at this, it was this chicken and mashed potato stuff, but people would just, how to say, by the time you get dishes and you scrape them off and you're trying to get all the food waste into something and you've got it all over your hands and yourself, and then the dishwasher's hot, so you got water going. By the time you get home, that was a nasty feeling. I've had a lot of those jobs where ... The other classic one was one stripping floors. They put that ammonia down, and you'd have to take a razor blade and scrape the edges. Imagine crawling all the way around a Hy-Vee on your knees, scraping this wax up. I've had my share of ones that I'm pretty happy that I don't have to do anymore.

Fred:

Yeah. For some reason, that reminds me. I worked in a grocery store and I was driving around their Zamboni, basically, at the end of the day. I didn't realize that the Zamboni was leaking just a little bit, and so I went around the entire grocery store and started looking behind and you're like, "Oh, I've been driving for the last 20 minutes leaking this slippery soap all over the floor."

So then it's like, "All right, let's fix that and then go back and let's redo our Zamboni route. I'll go counter clockwise instead of clockwise." Well, cool. It's been real, but it's time to get going. We got to hop on a plane here pretty quick, so really hope you like the show and got some sort of a nugget value out of it, even if you're just making fun of Dave and I and how we talk to each other. You didn't have to pay 12 bucks to get into the latest action thriller. You got to listen to our dumb asses talk for 40+ minutes. Hopefully it was entertaining.

Dave:

Hopefully you mined a little bit of something else.

Fred:

Yeah. Hopefully there's actually something good out of it besides just listening to us complain about our jobs as a kid. Really appreciate you listening. If you had a good time and you want more bacon bits, just subscribe to the podcast. You'll never miss an episode. Next week we'll be back at it, so we hope you will too. One of the best parts of doing this podcast is hearing the feedback from you guys. It's really as good as it gets. We'd like to hear what you have to say, so leave us comments, ask us questions. We'll definitely answer your questions on the show. You can always jump into the Quad City Safety social media conversations and get involved any time. Once again, safety has no quitting time, and we will see you next time. Thanks.

Outro Speaker:

Thanks for listening in to Dave and Bacon's Safety Tales, brought to you by Quad City Safety. Send us your questions on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter at Quad City Safety, #safetytales, or email them to Fred at quadcitysafety.com. He's the guy keeping this mess of a show in line. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes. It's a kickass way to show that you care about safety.