Someone I know took his 360 test at Bircham and got marked down for lifting one end of the machine to turn easier. He was told keep the tracks flat despite arguing that lifting them slightly did less damage to the machine and ground. This is where some of these habits start, bad instruction. Plus silly old buggers who know the lot and won’t be told, and cocky young buggers who ditto.
I’ve been on the other side as an operator who wanted to improve but with bosses who hadn’t got the patience to give me time to learn something properly. I have more than once pointed out that patiently explaining is more productive than bawling and shouting. There always have been a few operators who could hammer the crap out of a machine to “look good” and foremen who encouraged this. I’m including old time muckshifters from the “good old days.”
I worked with one dozer driver, briefly, who had operated the lot, up to and including D11’s. Always interests me how many ops have been on D11’s despite there only having been 3 or 4 in this country and probably never more than 2 at once for any amount of time. Anyway, we were both backfilling a hole on the same model of machine and he started tearing about pushing from the edges while I set a slot up through the middle. I could see him looking across and sneering until I got the slot going and started almost doubling his output each push. When we finished I asked him how he’d been on big machines but didn’t know how to set up a slot and he had a hissy and didn’t come back the next day. He’s probably still in bed waiting for that £30/hr job.
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