Paycheck again at 71?

Erik the Awful said:

Accepted. I understand that ultimately I have to look out for me, but I'm cooperative. I believe in leadership and followership, but I think most people don't understand either skill.

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Erik the Awful said:

Yup. Unions have to cull their bad workers. I saw my union push management to fire a person, and assured the company they would back the firing. The worker was turning out poor work, and counseling wasn't improving her performance. The firing went down smooth as butter, and both the union and the company were better for it.

Since that time I've wondered why temp agencies don't work more like unions and why unions don't work more like temp agencies. Unfortunately, I know that temp agencies only exist because management controls them, and unions are fighting for survival because management can't control them.

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thinger2 said:

Yep. But you need to look out for you first.
And you do that not only by learning your trade but by doing your own homework in order to understand the potential dangers.
Watch some OSHA videos and some catastrophic failure engineering videos.
These days OSHA videos are cartoon re-inactments.
Back in the day when you took an OSHA course it was live footage.
I think the computer re- inactments are a joke designed to make sure nobody gets offended.
And I also think that industry and businesses and lawyers are behind that transition to cartoons.
There is a computer generated version of a man who fell into a steel rolling mill back in the 90s. It does not hit the same as watching the film of what happened to him.
There is an OSHA cartoon about a guy who got electrocuted while standing in bilge water in a barge.
Watching the tape of that guy getting electrucuted is an entirely different reaction.
The people who get life altering injuries or die on the job are either young apprentices or journeymen in their mid to late 40s.
And the journeymen often times take out their apprentices when they make that one mistake.
That is how the Swiss Cheese theory works.
It is never one thing. It is always a series of seemingly disconnected events.
I did not know **** all about structural steel when I took the job.
My background was in precision quality control.
I was hired to fix the in house problems and to get them qualified to bid military contracts.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch.
The concrete guy had excluded supporting green walls.
And the GM had let them get away with it and not picked it up as part of their scope of work.
So, about 3 years later.
I have a couple of hundred of my people working on the 100 level on a really high wind day.
This thank god happened right after lunch time.
The stadium bowl was open to the south because they hadnt put the big moniter in yet.
But they had enclosed the north end "Screen Wall"
About a 50 mph or so gust blew through both ends of that open "Horseshoe" shape and backpressured those green unsurported cmu walls and blew out a 40 foot tall 280 foot long cmu wall and dropped it about 180 feet right on top of where my freinds were working.
The north 200 level CMU wall blew out and dropped through the sructure onto the 100 level and then onto the field level.
I was at the south end looking out of one the tunnels when it dropped and I have never run so fast or far in my life.
I dont know what I thought I could do standing at the 50 yard line but I was sure as **** that I had killed people.
And I damn near did.
I put my crew under unsurported green walls in a wind storm because I didnt know what the **** I was doing.
Lunch saved those guys.
Lunch.

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movietvet said:

I want to run a shop again, the way I know will work and not a cookie cutter way. That is one reason I never worked for a tire store or dealer. You are just a number.

I want to stay busy and have no problem working enough hours but at the 11 to 11.5 hours and even at $60k a year, that is less than $25 an hour and I am not going to do that. The shop rate is $160 an hour and it is busy and would be busier.

I wish I could stay busier at my home. I do ok but if I had a one bay lift shop, I would be a happy man.

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thinger2 said:

Those fully vested old farts do not give a **** about you.

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