I worked at distribution center warehouse for 24 years. During Covid I began being a back up supervisor for areas as managers and co workers wouldn’t be coming in. Due to the staffing issues I was working 6-7 days a week 12-16 hours a day. The money was good so I continued to build an upskill attitude even after Covid as I knew that hours would be getting cut. The more I knew how to do the more likely I could go to another area to work for more hours.
One of these areas was called merge operator and ion the 1st day management finally let me begin learning this I went up with the trainer only during 2 breaks and a lunch. So I got maybe two hours of training and all of that was on the computer where I learned to control the freight flow of the lines.
So I began covering the merge operator’s breaks and lunches. When he was off work they would have someone else cover that had more experience. I would occasionally have things occur I wasn’t trained to deal with and would have to call one of the others if they were available or call maintenance.
I continued to remind management that I need to be trained as the area could shut down the whole warehouse, but staffing was always told as the issue.
Fast forward about 6 months of me going up to cover this area by myself as the operator went to breaks and I get a jam with a mechanical arm.
Now this isn’t something I haven’t seen, the operator would grab the case by hand to clear the jam. Sometimes these arms would become out of alignment and we push them back by hand. Unless too far away and we’d use a jam pole.
So, I walk to the jam that is right next to me and grab the case blocking the arm. The arm snaps shut very fast pinning my wrist. I could not locate the emergency stop pull line and another line began releasing cases toward my direction. I did not want to find out what may happen if it reaches me so to avoid injury I hopped on top of the line so I could free my hand. All this happened in just a few seconds and I reported the incident right away. It was a non medical injury and I work the rest of my week until mid day of the last day when they call me to the office and tell me they had a meeting and I am terminated for getting on the line while it is running. I had nothing on my matrix, this was instant termination. I still am unsure if there was a protocol to clearing those arms, it is very possible the operator was doing it wrong too. The operator is not the trainer.
Trying to explain this in interviews for new jobs was difficult because it sounded unbelievable. I would constantly get “how can they let you be alone in an area without proper training?”
To note that proper training involves 36 hours where you cannot be away from the trainer and we both sign off on my training after that. This definitely never happened. I had reminded my operations manager 2 weeks before this that I still need to be properly trained so I don’t screw up.