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“It Was Only Blocked for a few Minutes”

In warehousing and operations, none of us begin our shifts planning to create risk or endanger someone. Most of us show up, jump on the forklift, our rider pallet jacks, or another piece of powered industrial equipment, to put away pallets, run freight across the dock, build loads, and try to hit our numbers. We hear the safety rules during orientation, we sign the training sheets, we watch the videos. And then we get comfortable. We convince ourselves that “just this once,” or “just for a few minutes” won’t hurt anything. Until it does. I’m Marty and today here at Warehouse and Operations as a Career I want to talk about a real scenario. A young forklift operator lost her job because she placed a stack of pallets in front of an egress doorway. She felt wronged. Her reasoning? It was only going to be there for a few minutes. I was going to move a few things around and would have come right back. She had been trained not to block doorways, exits, electrical panels, and fire extinguishers. She understood it in theory. But she didn’t understand why the rule was there. And that is the key difference between training and comprehension. Between compliance and belief. Between I heard you say it and I understand why doing it matters. In our industry, the difference between those two mindsets determines careers, safety, and sometimes even lives. Let’s begin with something easy to understand. Warehouse safety regulations exist because someone, somewhere, died or was severely injured before they were written. No safety standard, especially those around emergency exits, came from a textbook. They came from tragedy. Blocking egress routes, doorways, exit paths, hallways, or marked access points, has been a contributing factor in warehouse fatalities, factory fires, mass casualty incidents, and evacuation failures. In high-risk environments, you cannot predict when the emergency will come. You only know that if it does, people must be able to get out. When OSHA, the fire marshal, or an insurance company says Do not block exits, they aren’t being bureaucratic. They’re telling us history has proven that someone WILL eventually need that doorway in a moment they did not expect. Let’s take our forklift operator. She put those pallets there temporarily. In her mind, temporarily meant harmless. But here is the reality, Emergencies don’t wait until you’ve moved your pallets. Fires don’t pause. Workers don’t stop breathing because you need three more minutes to finish your task. Someone having a panic attack or a medical emergency doesn’t get to choose a different exit. And in the worst case, a forklift battery explosion, a flash fire, a pallet collapse, well, seconds are going to matter. Imagine this, A fire starts thirty feet away. A worker runs to the nearest exit, the same one blocked by her pallets, and they cannot push through. That delay, one or two seconds, might be the difference between smoke inhalation and survival. Suddenly just a few minutes isn’t a harmless mistake. It’s life-changing. One of the hardest lessons I’ve watched workers go through is the realization that danger never announces itself.  We forklift operators spend hundreds of hours moving pallets around. We get comfortable. We get to moving fast. We develop their rhythms and our shortcuts. And shortcuts are where careers end. I heard once that a shortcut is a decision built on the belief that risk is low, but made without proof. There is no risk assessment. There is no redundancy. There is only the operator’s personal confidence. But confidence is not the same as being right. Blocking an exit, stacking pallets where they shouldn’t be, driving faster because no one is looking, those aren’t skill-based decisions. They’re complacency-based decisions. And like we learned about 6 weeks ago with episode #337 titled The Cost of Comfort and Complacency is that complacency ends careers. Companies don’t train us because they are trying to check a box. Not in warehousing. Not in distribution. Not in our light industrial environments where 11,000-pound lift trucks are working around humans every minute. When you go through PIT training, when you sign the safety sheets, when the manager says Do not block emergency exits, that is a contract. The company is investing in our safety. The company is protecting the other employees. The company is following regulations. And by acknowledging that training, you are agreeing to follow those standards. One thing I remind new associates is, when you violate safety rules, you don’t just break the rule, you break the trust that permitted you to operate equipment in the first place. That forklift is a privilege, not a right. A license to operate PIT equipment was earned. It is maintained and kept through our behavior. You can be the fastest replenisher on the night shift. You can be the best put-away driver in the building. If you block an exit, you have demonstrated to leadership t...