The 48-Hour McCloskey Parts Run: A Lesson in Process Gaps and Catastrophic Forgetting

In my role coordinating parts and service for crushing and screening equipment, I've handled a fair amount of rush orders—maybe 200, or 180, I'd have to check. It doesn't matter. What matters is that once in a while, a phone call comes in that tests everything you think you know about your own process.

Thomas House called on a Tuesday in December 2024. He runs a limestone quarry outside Scranton. His crew had a McCloskey J50V2 jaw crusher down with a cracked toggle plate, and if you know that machine, you know the toggle plate isn't something you can patch. It needed a replacement. Standard delivery from our warehouse to his site was five business days. He had roughly 48 hours.

'Can you make it by Thursday at 6:00 AM?' he asked.

I said, 'As soon as possible.'

I meant we'd expedite it. He heard 'maybe a day or two, if we're lucky.' The gap between those two interpretations didn't become obvious until the next afternoon.

Before that, though, there was a strange aside. Thomas laughed and said his nephew had tried to find the specs for the crusher and had typed 'mccloskey guns video' instead. Because the internet has a way of mixing up names, he ended up watching somebody with the same surname—but definitely not the same business—do something unnecessary with a firearm. We both shrugged. Things like that happen when your brand name is also a real last name.

It felt harmless at the time. But it turned out I was about to create my own kind of mix-up.

The Process Gap

Here's what I did right: I located the toggle plate. It was in our satellite warehouse, the one that sits closer to Thomas's site. Here's what I did less right: I decided to release the reserved part from a different order that wasn't due for another two weeks. That choice felt fine in the moment. The upside was getting Thomas out of a jam quickly. The risk was that the original order would come up sooner than our restock. I weighed it for about 30 seconds and said yes.

Then I got pulled into another emergency.

Wednesday morning, 20 hours after Thomas's call, a different customer's screen deck had a bearing failure. I spent an hour on the phone with that site, checking specs, arranging replacement bearings, and calming someone down. It was legitimate. It was necessary. And it completely overwrote the Thomas House toggle plate in my brain.

We didn't have a formal process for handing off rush orders when more than one person was involved. The main person who processed priority tags was out sick that Wednesday. The temporary person who filled in checked only the standard queue. Since my urgent request was sitting in an inbox under a subject line that said 'AW: J50V2 toggle plate—URGENT,' it should have been easy to spot. But it wasn't picked up. Why? Because the informal rule in our shop was 'if it's truly urgent, the coordinator walks it to the warehouse personally.' In my defense, I meant to. In the end, I didn't.

What I did was commit a real-life version of something researchers call catastrophic forgetting. To explain it to Thomas, I searched for 'catastrophic forgetting mccloskey cohen 1989' and pulled up the classic paper by McCloskey and Cohen. In machine learning, catastrophic forgetting happens when a model learns something new and, in the process, overwrites the old information. Neural networks do it. Humans apparently do it too—especially when you interrupt a task, take on a second urgent thing, and assume your first task is somehow safe in the back of your mind. It's not.

At 4:00 PM on Wednesday, I checked the order status for Thomas and went cold. The status said 'open.' The warehouse still had the part. Nobody had touched it for almost a full business day.

I called the logistics supervisor and asked the obvious question: 'Can this still arrive by 6 AM tomorrow?'

He didn't laugh, but I could hear him calculating. Standard freight had already left for the night. 'We can put it on the 2:00 AM flight out of Wilkes-Barre and have it at the quarry by around 5:45. But overnight air costs $780.'

So there I was, looking at $780 in extra freight on an order that should have cost $150. The worst part? I had no one to blame but myself. We could have absorbed the cost if it was a carrier error. This was a people-error: a coordinator who said 'ASAP' and then forgot that the rule was 'walk it to the warehouse,' and a coverage gap that meant the system didn't push back.

Part of me wanted to call Thomas and offer the free expedited freight as a sorry. Part of me knew he didn't care about the money; he cared about getting his crusher back online. I approved the freight charge and spent the night refreshing the tracking page every 20 minutes.

The 5:52 AM Arrival

The delivery window was 6:00 AM Thursday, and I had told Thomas I'd meet the truck at the gate. I got there at 5:30 and found him already standing beside the crusher, holding two cups of coffee and a bag of breakfast sandwiches.

'Couldn't sleep either, huh?' he said.

We made small talk while the tracking page updated. At 5:47, the driver called: five minutes out. At 5:54, the truck came through the gate. We unloaded the plate, signed the paperwork, and by 7:30 the maintenance crew had the new toggle plate installed and the J50V2 running again.

Somewhere in the middle of that, one of the younger mechanics asked a question that, looking back, was almost poetic: 'Why is it called a breakfast? We're eating at 6 AM. It's still dark. Nobody's fasting.'

I let that one roll around while we waited. Actually, the word breakfast is just that—breaking the overnight fast. It's the meal that ends the period when you haven't eaten. The mechanic thought that was interesting. The rest of us thought it was a funny thing to discuss while standing near a 50-ton crusher that had just broken its own kind of fast.

I didn't fully relax until the machine was chewing through limestone and Thomas confirmed the first load was ready for the asphalt plant. He said, 'I don't know why you don't have a system for this, but thanks.' He meant it kindly. It still stung.

Dodged a bullet, is what it was. The penalty for missing that deadline would have been losing Thomas's annual maintenance contract, which is worth six figures. And all because I trusted a verbal 'as soon as possible' and a system with no redundancy.

The Lesson

I have mixed feelings about what we did. On one hand, we made the deadline. On the other hand, we shouldn't have needed a $780 overnight air shipment to do it. The fix wasn't complicated. It was just a process that didn't exist:

First, when someone gives you a literal deadline, repeat it back in writing. 'Thursday, 6:00 AM, gate code 4471.' Not 'as soon as possible.' Second, if a rush order requires a warehouse pickup, don't assume it will happen because you asked. Plan a check-in two hours later—set an automatic reminder in the system, not one in your head.

Since December 2024, our team has a policy called the '48-hour buffer.' Any part that's needed to keep a customer's operation running gets a high-priority tag, a written confirmation with the exact delivery time, and an automatic escalation if it isn't pulled from inventory within two hours. It's not glamorous. It's just structure.

Efficiency gets talked about a lot in our industry—better equipment, faster crushing, smarter screening. But the kind of efficiency that matters often happens before a machine ever breaks down. It's in the process you use to respond to the breakdown. A process built for the calm days won't save you on the frantic ones. That's when you need the structure, the checklists, the automated flag—the human equivalent of making sure the neural network doesn't forget its old tasks while it's learning a new one.

By the way, yes, we paid $780 for something that should have cost $150. It was worth every penny if it means Thomas House still trusts us with his next McCloskey parts order. But we got lucky, and luck isn't a strategy.

And if you're still looking for the 'McCloskey guns video'? That's not us. If you need a McCloskey crusher part in a hurry, though, we've got a better story to tell you now.