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Best week I ever had in the seat, and it started with a broken coffee maker
So the coffee maker in our site trailer died on a Monday morning, and I ended up grabbing a cup at the diner down the road before my shift. Got to talking with an older operator named Ray who was eating there too, and he told me he'd been running cranes for 31 years. He gave me one tip that morning that I won't forget: keep your swing brake snug when you're booming up with a load, not loose like I'd been doing. That same week I had to set 14 precast panels on a parking garage job in Tacoma, and every single pick went smooth as glass. My foreman even asked what I'd changed, and I told him a guy at a diner fixed my swing. Nine years in the seat and a 15 minute conversation over eggs taught me more than some of the classes I've sat through. Anyone else ever pick up a trick from a random old timer who wasn't even on your crew?
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luna5195d ago
I read a long thread on a trucking forum once where a bunch of old drivers said the same thing, that the stuff you really need to know gets passed down in diners and truck stops, not classrooms. "A guy at a diner fixed my swing" is a great way to put it, because most of those old timers never wrote anything down, they just showed the next guy. Half the tricks I use came from somebody I met for ten minutes who had no reason to help me.
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