What is the funniest thing you ever saw in operating heavy equipment

[narampa]

The most boring job you can get is driving a haul truck in a mine.
To liven things up a bit a friend of mine decided he was going to pull one on his supervisor. Here is what he did.
Haul trucks have a buddy seat that is used for training new operators. Otherwise the cabs are quite small. Operators were not allowed passengers unless they were training. In those days there were no women working in the mine.
The supervisor would pick a spot high on the bank to watch the shovels load the trucks. Along comes buddy and low and behold he has a women with him. The supervisor can't believe his eyes he races down the road after this truck. But buddy aint stopping he just keeps on going for all the truck could do. Later on up the road he pulls over and the super runs over to the truck and he climbs up the truck and than he is confronted by buddies girl friend. A rubber blow up doll sitting in the seat beside buddy.
The super took a lot of ribbing over this.

 

[jix]

Ray had what snobs call excessive Hubris..He thought that he could do anything better than anyone. He was not well-liked even among the pilots. I had to work for the guy. He never carted much about people, especially ground crew. That is [rtobably why he was never any thing but a flying truck pilot. I was OIC ground crew. My people were sometimes brought to tears by his attitude. He was thoughtless...and he had several ground crew that went far out of their way to make his job difficult. His plane was always the last one to be loaded or unloaded, causing him to be in trouble with the operations guys. Ray bent two hercs practising LAPES drops, but he was never grounded. Aircrew stick together, liked or not. He tried to get me court martialled once because I ordered the ground crew to get supper when he wanted to fly instead of wait for them to be fed...My boss would not agree to a court martial, but after that I never worked with him again. Ground crew stick together too.

 

[Looking4new]

Ray had what snobs call excessive Hubris..He thought that he could do anything better than anyone. He was not well-liked even among the pilots. I had to work for the guy. He never carted much about people, especially ground crew. That is [rtobably why he was never any thing but a flying truck pilot. I was OIC ground crew. My people were sometimes brought to tears by his attitude. He was thoughtless...and he had several ground crew that went far out of their way to make his job difficult. His plane was always the last one to be loaded or unloaded, causing him to be in trouble with the operations guys. Ray bent two hercs practising LAPES drops, but he was never grounded. Aircrew stick together, liked or not. He tried to get me court martialled once because I ordered the ground crew to get supper when he wanted to fly instead of wait for them to be fed...My boss would not agree to a court martial, but after that I never worked with him again. Ground crew stick together too.

Are you still 'in'?

 

[roadhunter]

We had a guy working for us who loved to go shirtless. He had long blonde hair and was a "Fabio" type. One day while working a road job a truck driver drove by the job and passed him and then came across the rest of the crew. He yells out his window "the blonde is cute but has no ****". The crew laughed their *** off and still talk about it to this day and that was 5+ years ago.

 

[mark02tj]

Back in the early 80's I worked in a sand paper factory. (Rough business - the owners were abrasive!) The factory building was a precast concrete building and the offices were "upstairs", basically supported like a loft, and they overlooked the factory floor.

One day cocky-Jim was running the forklift, moving stuff around. He hopped off it but left it running, in gear, and didn't set the brake. Pretty as you please, it just kind of idled along and the forks went right into the round wash sink outside the bathrooms! This sheared off the supply pipes flush to the concrete which resulted in a nice little fountain coming up from the floor! The only thing that stopped the fork lift was that the mast hit the steel support beam of the "floor" of the offices upstairs. That gave quite a bump to the office workers including the factory owner who failed to see the humor in the situation.

Once we got the water shut off, Jim got the job of mopping it all up! Ol' Jim didn't really see the humor in that! LOL! He didn't last much longer at the factory until he was given an opportunity to make money for another employer.

 

[Complete Turf Care]

Years ago a friend had just bought a home and borrowed a large bulldozer from a local farmer to do some cleaning up at his new place. At some point, he pushed on a tree that happened to have a swarm of bees inside it. In order to escape the bees, he jumped off the dozer and ran. As he jumped off, he hit one of the levers and put it into reverse.

When he got far enough, he looked back to watch the dozer slowly back into the bayou behind his house. By the time the engine locked up, all that was visible was the blade.

He didn't enjoy calling the farmer to come get his dozer out of the bayou.

 

[Ed of all trades]

I had a job doing HVAC in Pa and we did one job at a news paper printing co. It was a big addition and the job required us to take a safety test and have a sticker on our hard hat. We went into the office trailer and this was the test. We had to watch a 30 sec video of a man stepping out of a port a potty just as a crane swings an I beam into the back of it, nocking it over on the guy and then other workers pulling the brown coated guy out from under it. The project manager showed us the video 3 or 4 times laughing hard at it each time and gave us our safty stickers, we could now work on his job.

 

[swatter]

One day I was cleaning trash up using a lull to dump it into a dump truck. I kept putting trash in the bed and packing it down with the bucket. I did not know that the driver left the truck in 1st gear and the switch on to listen to the radio. Well on the last bucket I pushed the trash down and the truck lunged forward just a little. All I could do is watch in horror as the truck speed off into a building while the driver was across the street eating lunch.

 

[Sysop]

Around here a well has to be 100' from any septic system, and that old one would have had to be abandoned. Not that it always happens

That is a requirement most places I think, but I also think it is reserved for untreated drinking wells. For irrigation purposes or with proper chlorination and filtration it doesn't apply.

Sorry to be off topic, but I wanted to subscribe and have no "funniest" stories to tell. Only a couple disasters like the idiots I once worked with that thought it was a great idea to lift a 7.3L powerstroke with a chain and a skidsteer forklift. IdiotA hopped on the forklift, idiotB held the chain up with one hand while directing idiotA forward with the other hand. As soon as idiotB told idiotA to stop coming forward, idiotA slammed the forks up as quick as could be, grabbing idiotB's hand between the top of the fork and the chain they were using and lifting that 7.3L (still loaded with most of the fluids also) about a foot off the ground. I think you could have stabbed someone to death and had less bloody mess, and the other stories only get worse from there...

 

[jix]

Are you still 'in'?

Nope, I am a free agent now (which means I don't get paid) Too old to poke, fight, hold a light, or carry out the dead. Seems all that I do is shovel the blinking snow... Been doing that a lot this eternal winter, but it beats flying around in a Herc in the bleak barren darkness of the Arctic all winter. It's been forty years and I sill haven't gotten warm yet.... had a chance to work for an oil company in twin otters, but they said I would have to take an arctic survival course. Yeah, right, sure. Maybe some other lifetime. Igloos have no heat.