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Have you ever been accused or caught horse playing at work? I’ve seen so many meme’s on social media this week I’d like to talk about that for a minute. Welcome back everyone. I’m Marty with Warehouse and Operations as a Career! My first trip to HR was over a bit of horseplay. Me and 2 others grabbed an inventory control guy and shrink wrapped him to a support beam at the end of an aisle. We were on our way to lunch, I guess we assumed someone would come by and cut him loose. A bad assumption on our part, I guess. A cooler lead did walk by and cut him loose about halfway through lunch, to say the least, he was more than aggravated when he entered the break room. We were all friends though, he laughed it off, even bought us a few beverages after work that morning. I’m still not sure how HR got involved but thank goodness I, and it was only I that got called down to HR the next day, anyway I was extremely grateful I didn’t lose my job over it.
I once got picked up and thrown down the dumpster shoot, aggravated didn’t begin to describe my attitude once I climbed back up that nasty thing. I hate to admit it but a couple of weeks later I seeked my revenge. There was a 4 one-gallon case of syrup damaged in the salvage area. I took that and a half bag of flour to the dumpster, made sure to cover every square inch of the shoot and plotted my revenge. Took me a few minutes, it was quite the playful scuffle, but my friend ended up in the shoot, sliding all the way down to the bottom cleaning up the syrup and flour as he slide down. That was at the end of our shift, so I scooted on out of the building. The next morning everything was funny again and he’s been a lifelong friend still to this day.
As an order selector, we used tovairs and buggies back then, anyway one of the nightly pranks was to unhook the second buggy from the first and watch the selector take off down the aisle and having to walk back to get the second buggy. Oh, and during breaks you never wanted to take off your freezer suit and leave it hanging on your equipment. Us freezer selectors came back from breaks and lunch on more than one occasion only to find that our gear had been placed inside the freezer and was like ice when we were dressing back up.
Now I’m not proud of any of these pranks, I wish we were more mature than we were and that we’d of had the training we all get today. That was back before the OSHA standards and HR’s involvement in the operations. I found a good definition at https://www.fs.illinois.edu/docs/default-source/safety-compliance/horseplay.pdf?sfvrsn=d65f6ea_0 a toolbox talk article that gives us some information asked What is Horseplay? Horseplay is rough or rowdy play or pranks that occur at the workplace. Horseplay can be activities such as joking that includes physical contact, playing around, racing, grabbing, foolish vehicle operation, social pressure to participate in unsafe acts, harassment, and unauthorized contests. Often workplace horseplay incidents go unnoticed or are ignored as harmless fun. However, making horseplay a part of your workday may jeopardize your health and can lead to serious or deadly injuries. Each year there are hundreds of injuries in the United States from pranks at work. Workplace horseplay incidents may lead to serious injuries at work, divide the workplace, and prevent employees from getting their jobs done. In some states, horseplay that results in injury can result in criminal prosecution. Courts have held that these injuries are not the result of an accident but are deliberate acts.
I don’t remember anyone ever getting upset to the point that fist flung but I’m sure it happened. Also we live in a different environment or world today. Not only are we taught that horseplay will not be tolerated by our company, as the article stated it may very well be against the law and we can be prosecuted for a bad act. This week I’ve seen a lot of memes floating around. A college and I were talking yesterday how so many of them evolve just equipment these days. I loved one of them, a fork drivers peers took a roll, or several rolls of shrink wrap and totally wrapped shut the driver’s compartment. I wondered how many wraps around the lift it took, and how much time was spent on a prank that could literally be cut and removed in under a minute.
I had an employee, one of my employees at one of the facilities I work with dismissed this week for skateboarding a manual pallet jack. To make matters worse he was assigned to the production area where they don’t even have manual jacks. He was caught on video skating the jack over in the warehouse. I don’t know, maybe he was coming back from break or lunch, saw a jack and for whatever reason got on it and skated it. As we all know, that’s not allowed anywhere. It doesn’t seem all that dangerous, but I could spend 10 minutes sharing broken bone stories about skating.
Thank goodness for the rules and laws regarding horseplay in the workplace today. I’m so thankful I never hurt anyone or got hurt myself in my younger days. And thank goodness that our industry has grown so much in the last 20 years, especially in the Safety arena. I for one appreciate the training we receive today, and I hope we all realize the progress made, and that we each do our part to act, think and be safe at all times. We can save the playing around for the playgrounds with our kids!
Enough of all that I guess, you’d never be guilty of horseplay in the workplace, anyway right?
So I was asked, how do I start a plan for next year. I sat down to write out my plan and goals and nothing came to mind. How do I get started, what’s it supposed to look like? That’s a very good question. There is not a right way or wrong way. Even if I try and separate my personal and professional goals, they somehow seem to intertwine themselves every year, so I find that I usually start out with my personal ones and see where that leads me. My advice would be start with the obvious ones. Now you can’t write down to make 10,000 more dollars next year without adding the steps you’ll need to take to get there. By the way, 10k is only $4.81 more cents an hour, and those are just regular hours throughout the work year, if over times involved its even easier to make. That could be as simple as 1 promotion or 1 department transfer. Maybe going from a non-PIT or powered industrial truck task to using some sort of equipment or an equipment position. Imagine the increase coming from say the restaurant service fields into a sanitation or utility position. Or a warehouse General Labor job to a pallet runner job. If you’ve listened to most of this year’s programs you already know how you can make those moves. Oh, and it’s so important that we take advantage of any program our company offers, whither through production incentives, 401k programs or any bonus opportunities. Picture this, and I don’t know the exact formula that this facility uses, but here’s a great example of just plain making money. An attendance program. If you are on-time every day of the week you earn between $50 and $70 dollars for that week! That’s a possible $2600 a year just for being on time. I can easily get up 15 minutes earlier than what I need too knowing I’ll make $50 more dollars a week than I earn productivity wise. With $2600 dollars on the table, out of around 15 people there are usually only 3 to 6 of the employees earning it. And the others are only like 5 to 8 minutes late. Running 10 to 15 minutes earlier would put them all in the money. Now, not earning it is fine, its not effecting their jobs or potential at all, but, in my eyes that’s a $1.25 more an hour, and is a part of that $4.81 increase to get me that extra $10,000 I’m wanting to make next year!
I got lost there again, anyway, like I said there’s not a wrong way to start on your goals. I listed 3 things I wanted to do next year. On my list I wrote visit New York city, I have a friend that’ll be giving her 1st TedTalk up there next year, what a great excuse to take a trip right? And then I added a convention I wanted to attend in Orlando Florida, and added a few instructor certifications I wanted to achieve under a education header. Of course, I’ll need to pay for those trips and classes, so I’ve started creating a spending budget. . Now next time I set down to work on it I already have three things to work off of. Try not to make it any harder than it is. It’ll come to you and you’ll be surprised how easy the paths are to achieve each one of your goals. It is time to get started though, jot down some ideas today and come back to them in a day or so. I bet you’ll already have some great ideas about how to achieve’em. You know last year about this time we talked about how to save $1378.00 using the 52 week money challenge, I’ll add the link in todays show notes again today. I love this simple challenge. https://www.thesimpledollar.com/thoughts-on-the-52-week-money-challenge/ , anyway how’d you do there? We talked about adding $5000 to our end of year wages this year, what’d we figure that’d be, um, what was that , $2.40 an hour. I’ve heard for a lot of us that’s achieved that. Yep it was hard work, we may have had to change positions even, but we achieved it! Want to double that this year? $4.81 cents an hour increase? Its very doable, we’ll just need to have a plan. I’ll put together an episode on planning and goals real quick, a how to get started if you will. Maybe I can get some help, I’ll ask around and see what I can learn. If you have a time honored and proved technique please share it with the group, send it over to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com and we’ll help you share it! I’m kind of excited to put something like this together.
Well, there’s a few of my random thoughts for the week. And please take horseplay seriously, the equipment we operate can be dangerous, treat it with respect. It will not be funny when someone gets hurt or we lose our positions.
Until next week be Safe out there, our families are waiting on us to get home!