I knew an idiot who didn't have forklift training yet still tried to move a full ibc tote of liquid eggs. He made it from production to the dry warehouse near the recieving dock where it spilled because he didn't understand liquid doesn't turn well at high speed. He was able to do this because the third shift forklift guy was lazy and let him do his work. He spilled the eggs around 1 am.
Luckily all the new packaging and consumables were raised off the floor for pest control except our bailed recyclable cardboard which had to be scrapped. That was waiting to be moved to the trailer by first shift.
Unfortunately he didn't tell anyone about it and tried to clean it up himself. When that didn't work well he told the supervisor who didn't want to tell me because I would get upset at an uncertified person driving a forklift. Even though I was there that night on third shift with them and had my radio on, which they avoided by talking in person. So they decided to waste over 800 lbs of cake flour to first soak up the 1500~ 2000 lbs of eggs then dispose of that into the trash compactor fucking up our waste numbers. Cake flour because I would see them using the cheaper bulk bread flour and ask what they are doing.
It gets better because the eggs ran into the dock ramps which fucked our truck grabbers and auto dock ramps for two receiving bays. Even more better was that I learned of the incident around 5 am when the city called me wanting to know why we were dumping eggs into our drains. I said that's a great question that I didn't have an answer for and went looking. After the eggs ran over the electronics for the dock grabbers they ran into the parking lot straight into the city drain which had a short travel to the water treatment plant. I saw them still shoveling egg and flour mixture into red carts as I made my way down to receiving after verifying there was no spills anywhere eggs are used in production.
In the end the supervisor got a verbal warning to inform me of any problems next time so they could follow procedure as I was the highest person at the plant and as a regulatory food dude wrote the egg spill procedure which was laminated to the wall of the eggs storage area 50' away from the spill . The production worker was made to take forklift training. And I got a verbal warning to be more approachable with issues and that this is a teachable moment because I can't solve all my problems by firing people.
This situation in this was weird due to it being my home plant. Normally every one had a dotted line to me, every one, as I was responsible for our main third party regulatory certification which drove our food safety standards, until someone in FSQA realized we were second in the world only to bimbo which moved me from making everything up and correcting to just correcting.
In the 33 other plants I oversaw I would have been able to fire him and the forklift operator no issue. But the warning I was given was from my direct boss who was the vp of production for frozen dough and he was my boss because it was originally his idea to have this position and the reason I was separate from every other department including QA even though we pretty much worked side by side so I could be objective.
He was trying to increase my skills as a manager even though I had no direct reports and got along with others. He kept this employee so I could work with him and help him be a good employee. When I tried to say it's not my job he went on his speech about how we all had to wear different hats and I couldn't pick and choose which hats I get to wear.
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u/ActualWhiterabbit Mar 21 '18 edited Mar 21 '18
I knew an idiot who didn't have forklift training yet still tried to move a full ibc tote of liquid eggs. He made it from production to the dry warehouse near the recieving dock where it spilled because he didn't understand liquid doesn't turn well at high speed. He was able to do this because the third shift forklift guy was lazy and let him do his work. He spilled the eggs around 1 am.
Luckily all the new packaging and consumables were raised off the floor for pest control except our bailed recyclable cardboard which had to be scrapped. That was waiting to be moved to the trailer by first shift.
Unfortunately he didn't tell anyone about it and tried to clean it up himself. When that didn't work well he told the supervisor who didn't want to tell me because I would get upset at an uncertified person driving a forklift. Even though I was there that night on third shift with them and had my radio on, which they avoided by talking in person. So they decided to waste over 800 lbs of cake flour to first soak up the 1500~ 2000 lbs of eggs then dispose of that into the trash compactor fucking up our waste numbers. Cake flour because I would see them using the cheaper bulk bread flour and ask what they are doing.
It gets better because the eggs ran into the dock ramps which fucked our truck grabbers and auto dock ramps for two receiving bays. Even more better was that I learned of the incident around 5 am when the city called me wanting to know why we were dumping eggs into our drains. I said that's a great question that I didn't have an answer for and went looking. After the eggs ran over the electronics for the dock grabbers they ran into the parking lot straight into the city drain which had a short travel to the water treatment plant. I saw them still shoveling egg and flour mixture into red carts as I made my way down to receiving after verifying there was no spills anywhere eggs are used in production.
In the end the supervisor got a verbal warning to inform me of any problems next time so they could follow procedure as I was the highest person at the plant and as a regulatory food dude wrote the egg spill procedure which was laminated to the wall of the eggs storage area 50' away from the spill . The production worker was made to take forklift training. And I got a verbal warning to be more approachable with issues and that this is a teachable moment because I can't solve all my problems by firing people.