Hit 1,000 lifts without a single close call. Here's what I learned.

I made it to 1,000 lifts the other day without any kind of incident. Not one swing that got away or load that shifted wrong. It sounds like a lot but when you run a 50-ton Terex on a busy site in Houston, it adds up faster than you think. The thing that surprised me was how many of those lifts were the easy boring ones where I almost let my guard down. I had a moment last month where I nearly forgot to do a proper tagline check on a routine steel beam pick. That would've been bad. The close calls I had before this streak came from getting comfortable, not from the hard stuff. So now I try to treat every lift like it's number two or three, even when I'm tired or rushing. Has anyone else noticed their biggest mistakes come on the simple jobs?

2 comments

2 Comments

christopher_sullivan8d ago

The boring jobs are exactly where I've had my closest calls too. I do a lot of repetitive pickups moving bundles of pipe, and I caught myself skipping the hand signal check once because I'd done the same lift a hundred times that week. Now I force myself to stop and say the rigging plan out loud before every pick, even if nobody's around to hear it. It sounds stupid but it breaks that autopilot mode and makes me actually look at what I'm doing instead of just going through the motions.

iris_davis908d ago

Wait, do you ever catch yourself just zoning out mid-lift and suddenly realize you don't even remember the last three steps you took? That's scary stuff. I've been there too, and honestly, talking out loud to yourself is one of those things that feels ridiculous until it saves your hand or your foot. Another trick that helps me is to physically touch the rigging gear before I grab it, like tap the shackle or run my hand along the sling. It forces that brain-hand connection to actually slow down and register what you're dealing with instead of just muscle memory taking over.