Imagine working in the construction industry.

As you can probably imagine, there would be a lot of rules about safety. Would you strictly follow these rules, or would you be willing to take shortcuts if it meant getting the job done faster?

In this story, one group of road construction workers is in this exact situation. They thought taking a shortcut was the right thing to do, but the boss disagreed. Let’s see how the story plays 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.

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.

They did a lot of heavy lifting.

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 nowhere to be found.

Meeting deadlines is important.

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.

Hours went by.

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 almost 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.

Here’s how it all worked out…

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.

It’s good that the boss didn’t want them to lift things that were really too heavy for them to lift safely, but the company obviously didn’t understand the consequences until it was too late.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

One person shares why it’s a bad idea to take shortcuts.

Another person points out that safety rules are there for a reason.

Here’s another person who knows that it’s a bad idea to take shortcuts.

Everyone thinks it’s important to follow safety rules and not take shortcuts.

Safety really should be the top priority.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.