Road construction can be really hard work, but it’s important to follow safety rules.

If you were working on a road construction site and were told not to lift certain equipment without a crane to assist you, would you follow orders or ignore the rules to get the job done faster?

In this story, several workers ignored the rules until the boss told them safety is more important. While they didn’t really agree, they had no choice but to comply.

Let’s see how that works out.

Don’t move these sheets of rubber by hand? You got it boss!

So this takes me back a few years ago when I was working road construction.

Specifically at the time we were building huge retaining walls along major highways, and these retaining walls had a fancy pattern that we got in the concrete by putting these heavy sheets of rubber “rustification” on the inside of our forms.

These rubber panels were HEAVY! 400-500 pounds a piece heavy.

The boss cared about safety, but the workers just wanted to the job done.

Normally we would use equipment like a sky track or crane to put them on our forms but if you’ve ever worked construction you know that it can be tough to find an operator or piece of equipment when you needed one.

So when we couldn’t use equipment we would get 4-5 guys to manually lift and carry these panels to put them in place(it could be done with as little as 2 guys but forget that).

With 4-5 guys they were still heavy but very manageable but this company is all about safety safety safety so when big boss sees us lifting them he lets our foreman know hey those guys can’t be doing that, they need to use equipment.

Our foreman relays the message to us and we all kinda look at each other like ooookay boss if you say so, as if we haven’t been manually lifting them all day because an operator was no where to be found.

They had no choice but to comply.

Also if you’ve ever worked road construction you know that everything has a deadline and the company gets fined thousands upon thousands of dollars per day for everyday they go over the deadline.

We knew we would never get these forms ready in time without manually lifting them but hey boss says we need to use equipment so okay!

We set off to work and get maybe 1 and a half forms ready before our operator is needed elsewhere on the job site.

There is literally nothing else to do without having these forms ready.

Maybe this is why it often looks like all the workers are just standing around when you drive by road construction sites.

15 minutes go by then 30 and before ya know it, it’s been 2 hours and still no operator.

Our foreman comes by to check on our progress and proceeded to damn near have a stroke when he saw how little was accomplished.

He starts asking why and yelling about deadlines and concrete will be here at x time and we need these forms done yesterday.

We just kindly remind him that we are not to be lifting these manually anymore and our operator took off 2+ hours ago.

The boss’s boss had to get involved.

Big boss gets involved and big bosses boss gets involved.

Eventually their solution was to hire another operator and purchase another skytrak specifically for this job not before losing thousand in fines from missing deadlines though.

In the end it made our lives much much easier and we were a little proud of how we handled it.

I have about a dozen more good stories from that job, but overall it was a great job with great people and great pay. I learned a lot and made lifelong friends, that we’ll still call each other up and talk about all the funny stuff that happened out there on the road.

Safety is important. I’m glad the workers complied.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person points out the importance of safety.

A boss weighs in.

They really should’ve done things differently from the beginning.

Nobody thought anything malicious happened here.

It really is important to follow safety rules.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.