Welcome to the 19th week of the year! I\u2019m Marty, and I\u2019d like to thank you for joining me here at Warehouse and Operations as a Career! We have several new subscribers that\u2019s joined us recently and I\u2019d like to thank them for clicking that little Subscribe button & encourage you to share your thoughts and suggestions on topics with us by joining our Facebook and Twitter feeds where we can be found by using @whseandops or emailing host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com . I\u2019ll see that we answer or get the answers to each of your questions and try and share as many as we can on the show here. Hey, that\u2019s what WAOC is all about, us learning from each other, breaking into the Operations arena, achieving success within our jobs and if our goals are to turn that job into a Career we\u2019ll try and offer up some experiences and thoughts on planning to accomplish just that!
\nTwo weeks ago, we talked about a couple of things I felt we\u2019re important to us, things I thought we needed to have a little knowledge on to get noticed by our management teams and help ourselves in the Warehouse. One of those things were SDS Books or Safety Data Sheet stations. We received a few questions about them, so I thought maybe we should talk a little more about what they are and why we need to know where there kept and why that\u2019s even important. We\u2019ll check in with our WAOC Safety guy Joe here in a bit and get the thoughts of a professional, I\u2019m certain we\u2019ll all think a little differently after having them explained to us today! I feel they can possibly save us from being permanently disabled in some way or chemically burned or worse. Secondly, it\u2019s one of the first questions a compliance or 3rd party auditor may ask us as an employee, and certainly not lastly it could very well be the Law in certain industries. I think every employee needs to know how to find that information and how to read them quickly, so we\u2019ll know how to treat a spill or contamination should our coworkers or ourselves come in contact with a chemical we\u2019re not familiar with. We all know it\u2019s important to keep even household chemicals put away at home, to protect our children and how we should never mix different detergents, chemicals and solvents or disinfectants at home to clean our bathrooms and kitchens. When we have an emergency at home and call an emergency line, the first thing they reach for is the Safety Data Sheet for the chemical\u2019s name we\u2019re calling about. I have a friend that\u2019s pulled up the sheets on every chemical in his home and reviews them with his family twice a year! He also changes the batteries in the smoke alarms, teaches his children to be aware that cords are snugly inserted into electrical outlets at all times and how extension cords have no use in the home too. Yep, he\u2019s a Safety consultant and has seen the devastating results complacency and not being aware or prepared can cause. I\u2019m always kidding him about his obsession with the subject, but I have to agree his family and children are much safer with that knowledge than I am or most of us probably are.
\nI\u2019d also had a question about forklifts this week, and it\u2019s came up several times, so I wanted to talk about it as well for a minute. I was asked by an experienced sit down or counter balance lift driver if it was going to be hard for him to learn to drive a stand-up reach lift. As we like to say here at WAOC, experience in our fields is the only teacher, that there\u2019s just no short cuts. None of us are born with a Powered Industrial Equipment gene in us, I don\u2019t feel operating any type of warehouse equipment is really difficult, but we have to be taught how it works. I think its operation starts with understanding how dangerous they can be & that Safety is the first component. If we\u2019ve been taught all the Safety procedures and processes and we act responsibly at all times when using or are around equipment that once we\u2019re shown the controls, an equipment\u2019s uses,