Rough night at work last night. We had a lot to get done, and we were down a very important team member. Big Joe. Big Joe died. Big Joe was strong, a hard worker and quite a reliable asset to the company. Big Joe was our pallet stacker, and he will be missed.
For the past couple of weeks, we have noticed that Big Joe has been smelling slightly of burnt rubber on the big heavy loads. However, last night, we were noticing the smell more frequently and even on the small loads the smell was there.
Finally, he had had enough. When I was using Big Joe to put a pallet of water on top of the steel bin, I noticed that smoke was billowing from the machine! With the water all the way up in the air, I had to continue the lift and get the water put away, for I knew that this would be the last lift he would perform for the evening. To be on the safe side, James came over with the fire extinguisher. Good thing was, he didn't have to use the extinguisher, but we quickly moved Big Joe to his parked position and performed a lock-out/tag-out on him.
With Big Joe dead and gone, we did struggle for the rest of the evening to work around all the items that we needed to put up in the steel but couldn't. Hopefully, management will be able to get Joe either fixed or repaired quite soon, because without him, the backroom just can't run smoothly.
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