DAE ever count how many times they've tapped a riser? | Foundry Workers

Daniel Martin · 2026-04-19T22:20:06.298853+00:00

I was cleaning up my station yesterday and found an old tally sheet stuck to the back of my furnace log. I'd been marking it every time I tapped a riser on our big gray iron pour line. The count was 1,247. That's a weirdly specific number to just stumble upon after maybe two years. It mattered because I realized I'd done that exact motion, with the same 8-pound hammer, over a thousand times without really thinking about it. My buddy Jim saw me staring at the paper and just said, 'Yep, that's a lot of whacks.' Has anyone else found a random count of some tiny, repetitive job task that added up to something silly?

dixon.iris6mo ago

My back hurts just reading that number.

3

logan_young296mo ago

Remember that book about the guy who counted paperclips? This feels like that.

1

julia_anderson6mo ago

It's just part of the job, right? You do the same thing a thousand times because that's what keeps the line running. Making a tally sheet for it seems like overthinking. The number is big, but it's just work. It doesn't have some deeper meaning.

1