Althouse: Collapse.

November 7, 2009

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20 comments:

Titus said...: I am so glad to see Meadsy use my term of endearment in his salutation.

If you wanted to be really daring you could be Meadsy Poo.

I don't which I like better Meadsy or Meadsy Poo. I think I like both equally the same.; 11/7/09, 2:18 PM
MadisonMan said...: I saw you and Meade out driving Silvio today (behind BS on Hollister) and am glad that Meade wasn't driving like the forklift driver, as we were crossing the street as you drove by.; 11/7/09, 2:23 PM
blake said...: Oh. I get it. "Under the influence of alcohol."; 11/7/09, 2:23 PM
Ann Althouse said...: @MM You should have flagged us down!; 11/7/09, 2:32 PM
Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said...: .
Вод Как! Водка !; 11/7/09, 2:34 PM
Meade said...: Yeah, MadMan, next time flag us down with one of those street-crossing red flags!

(Uh oh, I do hope I yielded to pedestrians that time and didn't make you jump back to the curb to save your dear lives!); 11/7/09, 2:36 PM
Anonymous said...: Hey! I blogged this one first!
I've also driven forklifts, which is bad enough sober.

wv = bleanki
What the forklift driver's memory is of all this.; 11/7/09, 2:43 PM
The Drill SGT said...: Reminds me of a scene out of Harry Potter, at the Minstry of Magic :); 11/7/09, 3:14 PM
kentuckyliz said...: I saw that on Ellen the other day, when I was home early because I was feeling really sick.

All that vodka, ruined!

It's so sad.; 11/7/09, 3:30 PM
Ralph L said...: My boss backed into me with the forklift last year, knocking me down and rolling over my foot. Since I'm not a warehouse employee on his workman's comp, he was lucky I had just scrapes and bruises.

I don't turn my back on a moving forklift anymore.; 11/7/09, 3:34 PM
Anonymous said...: Kentuckyliz: It would have been much, much worse had those boxes been full of bottles of good Scotch or even Bourbon.; 11/7/09, 3:44 PM
rhhardin said...: In big box stores, it will be okay if you just slow a forklift to a crawl and go very carefully. video.; 11/7/09, 4:05 PM
Anonymous said...: Looks like Barack Obama driving the economy.; 11/7/09, 4:09 PM
T.K. Tortch said...: Best job I every had was as a forklift driver over the summer between my sophmore and junior year in college. Or at least, it was the most fun. I was one of three drivers drivers in a peach packing shed in South Carolina. During peak season we were the most important workers in the shed: peaches coming in out of the field couldn't sit overnight, or heat built up in them over the day would ripen them to the point they couldn't be shipped for long distances. So everything coming through the shed had to be put through the "hydrocooler", basically a twenty-yard long conveyer belt through a supercooled liquid shower. Two stacked boxes full of peaches, about 6' x 6' x 3', go in one end & ten minutes come out the other. Then either into cold storage for the night or onto a dumper to go through the sizing, grading and packing lines.

When the peaches were ready they had to be picked and taken out of the field, no matter how many peaches that was and how long it took. So at peak season, we were first to get to work and last to leave; arriving at around 7:30 and we might run continuously, with half hour breaks at lunch and supper, up to one or two A.M.

The crates of peaches came out of the field non-stop, pulled by tractors & packed five in a row on a trailer the same width as the crates; we had to get them off, stack them, put them through the cooler, take 'em out, & if they weren't getting dumped through the grading process right away, stack them in coolers nine and ten high. All at pretty much breakneck speed. We pretty much became forklift acrobats. The back of the shed was strictly off limits to anybody on foot, as we wear in a constant state of tear-ass and were likely to come zipping around a corner carrying a load of peaches that weighed several thousand pounds. We could pick up, shove, tilt, balance, jimmy, shiv, wedge, slide, bump and bounce those crates with remarkable precision and delicacy; get them in and out of places you wouldn't think was possible.

The job was a perfect combo of speed, adrenaline,and skill; We were all 20 - 23 years old and sort of in competition with each other. Named and decorated our forklifts, etc. And it was seasonal; it barely lasted three months, so we didn't get sick of it. Pay was good, too.

At the end of the day, throw a warm twelve-pack on the last crate of peaches to go through the cooler, and ten minutes later they come out at 35 degrees. Yay!!; 11/7/09, 4:46 PM
KCFleming said...: You shouldn't ingest the product you're stocking, generally.

The Metamucil Factory Incident still haunts me.; 11/7/09, 6:12 PM
themightypuck said...: That looked kind of on purpose. I realize it is a natural human tendency to assign agency to things but the thing sped up and aimed for the tender corner of the stack. It's either possessed or the driver was.; 11/7/09, 7:51 PM
Tibore said...: "Pogo said...
You shouldn't ingest the product you're stocking, generally.

The Metamucil Factory Incident still haunts me."

ROTFLMAO!

And on that note, I'm glad I never worked at a Viagra warehouse. How would you steer a forklift then? :-S; 11/7/09, 11:47 PM
An Edjamikated Redneck said...: Well, there would be ONE obvious answer, but I'm not using it.

WV: Winater- technical term for snatching defeat from the jaws of Victory.; 11/8/09, 6:21 AM
JAL said...: Well I laughed out loud. Called hubby over. He watched it, and said "That can't be real."

It was sooo total. Had to be animated, ... like that fabulous pixelated music machine from Iowa. (If that hasn't shown up on your puter, it's here. )

But then Russian warehouse shelving might have been pretty crappy. Sort of like the "healthcare" we will have in 5-10 years thanks to the Democrats.; 11/8/09, 8:15 AM
T.K. Tortch said...: Pogo:

After that job, it took me years to even look at a peach.; 11/8/09, 8:03 PM