Vent: Talked to a 30-year veteran who called me out on my safety check habits

I was bullshitting with an old timer named Dave at the yard last Tuesday, he watched me do my pre-op inspection on the Grove RT540. He said "you're just looking, not seeing" and pointed out I missed a hairline crack in the boom weld I'd walked right past. Has anyone else had a senior operator humble you with one comment like that and make you rethink how you run your whole routine?

2 comments

2 Comments

beth_sanchez471mo ago

Question whether it's really that serious? Come on man, I get what the old timer was saying and I respect his experience, but a hairline crack on a boom weld isn't exactly a ticking time bomb. If you're doing your daily checks and actually running the machine for a bit, you'll notice if something feels wrong anyway. Operators have been overhyping these little details forever, acting like missing one tiny thing means you're going to drop a load on someone's head. Half the time those cracks are just surface stuff that gets caught at the next PM anyway. Plus that Dave guy probably spent 20 years running cranes with way less safety gear than we have now, so his standards might be a little out of touch with real world risk levels.

derekcarr1mo ago

Used to blow off safety talks but that story about the crack really made me stop and think.