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My buddy the contractor called me out on my stubborn ladder habit last weekend
I was setting up a 6-foot stepladder on some uneven ground at a job site and my friend Dave, who's been framing houses for 20 years, just shook his head. He told me I was gonna break my neck reaching for stuff instead of grabbing the 8-footer from the truck. It hit different because he showed me a picture of a guy in the hospital from doing exactly what I do every day. Anyone else get called out for a lazy safety habit by someone who's seen the worst of it?
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barbara_baker571mo ago
...and the thing nobody's talking about is how the shorter ladder makes you lean and twist in ways that are just as bad for your back as falling off a tall one. I got a buddy who blew out a disc in his lower back not from a fall but from cranking his body at a weird angle to reach one more spot with the caulk gun. The 8-footer forces you to climb down and move it, which sounds annoying but actually keeps your spine in a neutral position the whole time. Plus that wider base on the bigger ladder handles uneven ground way better than a dinky 6-footer tipped to one side anyway.
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matthewkim1mo ago
You're acting like the 8-footer magically walks itself over to you every time. Carrying around a bigger ladder all day just because you might need it once is its own kind of lazy, especially when you're just trying to finish a quick caulk line on level ground. Your friend showed you a horror story, sure, but how many guys have busted their tailgate or scratched up a doorway hauling a ladder that's way too big for the job? Maybe the real safety hazard is spending ten minutes dragging a heavy ladder up three flights of stairs when a shorter one would have done the work in thirty seconds.
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