So it's the annual audit of inventory at work and I'm in a steel cage at the end of the forks of a lift truck, twenty feet off the ground ..... in the sub zero air of a freezer and I hear a loud pop. It means one thing ..... The hydraulic hose on the lift truck just burst and it's spewing fluid in all directions and the only thing holding us up (I wasn't alone in the cage) is the cardboard totes full of frozen whole beans that the cage was hovering over as we were attempting to count and verify the numbers ..... And we're stuck up there for ten minutes as the stacks of totes in the adjacent stack are pulled out of the way so another lift truck with another cage can be brought in and we can tip toe across the four-high stack of totes and climb into our rescue chamber ..... and I'm trying to act calm and cool all this time even though I have a long held fear of walking across even the most stable looking stack of four or six-high totes.
And the fact that I'm here documenting this incident means that nothing fell over under my extreme weight. But I did witness our crippled lift trucks forks and cage make a drastic freefall plunge to the frozen concrete floor below once we were all clear and the attempt was made to back out of the situation slowly. And I couldn't help but think: What if we had all still been in that cage when it made its plunge? And how we're always generally just a second or two away from some sort of possible injury or worse be it at work or home or simply walking down the sidewalk.
No matter how cautious you are, you still never know what's up ahead.
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