Caught out by his own ego

The story of the fork lift truck driver who posted his fork lift hooning activities on YouTube, presumably assuming nobody was going to go onto the web, look at the video and recognise him and his workplace.

Unfortunately, YouTube have removed the offensive video so we are unable to get the full flavour of what this young gentleman got up to. We are left with the dry description from those party poopers at Worksafe Victoria. “The video showed him deliberately crashing into concrete pipes, doing burnouts and overloading the machine so he could do wheelies,” they said.

Many a young man will have passed through this phase and usually gets away with it while also, hopefully, getting a real fright having taken the fork lift to the limits of its capabilities without actually hurting anyone.

It is one of those things, like a rite of passage, finding out how far we can push things before we decide to pull our head in.

Where our hero (antihero?) went too far was by taking the whole thing to a higher level. He actually decided to advertise how young and stupid he is to the whole world via one of the most popular websites on earth.

It comes as no surprise the YouTube footage came to the attention of Matthew Ward’s boss and he was dismissed as a result.

He was also prosecuted and can now fill his time doing 50 hours of unpaid community service, completing a five-day Occupational Health and Safety course and find a way to pay WorkSafe’s court costs of $1200.