this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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Most people don't actually want to hurt their coworkers. But the reason lockouts are actual physical locks, is because people can get confused, make mistakes.
You give everybody doing the dangerous work a physical key to a specific lock on the device that can kill them, so they all have to come back and unlock it individually before you can enable the machine again.
Prevents issues like a work crew leaving a site piecemeal, and then the first guy thinks the last guy is done, but the last guy ran back to grab something....
And if this industrial panel doesn't have the ability to be locked out, you lock out the f****** electrical panel and cut power to it.
There are quite a few plane crashes where one important factor was the flight crew getting on the airplane and seeing an "INOP do not use" sticker and figuring "IDK, seems like it's working fine" and using it anyway.
Basically what I'm saying is, yes. There's a reason they started making physical locks for this, it wasn't because they were just sitting around one day in a corpse-free office and decided it would be a fun project to undertake.
I believe a lot of rules are written in blood, but some people think they're too smart for chesterton's fence.