Changing Footwear
As a runner, shoes are important to me. The wrong shoes can cause injuries. Wearing shoes too long can cause injuries. Downtime is disappointing to a runner. It is something that runners try to avoid. When I started thinking about it, downtime is even worse for a driver. It can cause a financial disaster. Wearing the proper footwear can maximize your up time.
A good pair of running shoes last about 450 miles for running. After that they can actually cause injury if you run in them. They can still be perfectly fine to wear as your “knock around” everyday shoes. I tend to wear them until you can see my toes sticking out the sides. I become attached to them. Throwing them out is impossible for me to do. The job of throwing them out falls to my wife. I will actually ask her to throw them out. She happily complies, while quietly questioning me sanity.
I wore those old shoes for everything including fingerprinting floor loads. One time I had a forklift driver drop a pallet on my foot. The thing swelled up immediately. The customer drove me to the ER for Xrays. Fortunately nothing was broken. Other than missing 2 days of work, I was fine.
Then one day a customer would not allow me to unload a floor load without steel toed shoes. They were really
trying to force drivers to hire lumpers. The company that I was with paid us whatever the cost of the lumpers was. In this case the lumping company paid the consignee 30% of what they took in to use their equipment. The load paid me $283. It took me close to 4 hours to palletize, and stage the load. I invested about $100 in steel toed shoes. I unloaded 2 more loads at that customer. They were a good investment. The customer said that I took too long. They put 2 lumpers with a fork lift (I was always given a hand jack) on the load. They could get it done in 3 hours. I sat for 3 hours after that and collected $50 in detention pay.
I kept those old steel toes in the truck with me. I had them until I could stick my hand through them. My old running shoes were still my daily work wear. Those shoes were there just in case. So, I carried a current pair of running shoes My old steel toes were there in case a customer required them. I was carrying 3 pairs of shoes. Recently I replaced those old steel toes with a good pair of steel toed work boots.
Those new boots are comfortable to drive in or for most walks. They provide a more professional appearance than my old running shoes. Now, I just have the boots and my current running shoes in my truck. That saves space. They protect my feet better than my old running shoes. I look back on missing 2 days of work when that forklift driver dropped that pallet on my foot. These boots may just have saved me 2 days of downtime. That seems like a pretty good investment to me.