To every season change change change

If you come in for an interview with us its likely you'll meet with either myself or with my counterpart Megan. As we speak with folks we are always curious to see what they really know about our company. One of our favorite questions asks candidates if they know how long Pinnacol has been around. It doesn't take much research by anyone who visits pinnacol.com to find out we will be celebrating our 100 year anniversary next August. Those who don't know we've been around that long generally guess that we are 20-30 years old and they are surprised when we tell them about our upcoming centennial.

To say there has been a lot of change in the last 100 years is an obvious understatement and change continues to this day. One of my favorite truisms is that if your not moving ahead then you are falling behind and behind that sentiment is the reality that change is a constant. One of the changes Pinnacol has been working on for some time is to digitize all of our records. Periodically Craig and Jose let me see some of the artifacts they uncover and recently they brought over a tome entitled "Employee Accident Index". This particular volume was for the period May 1942 through May 1945 and covered the alphabet from Aa through Go. There's nothing wrong with digitized records and they certainly make it easier for all of us in the modern world to get our work done. Nonetheless I sometimes wonder if we don't lose something by not being able to interact with things like this. Pictures alone can't do justice; simply hefting it gave me pause - to the point that I actually went over to our wellness center and put it on the scale. This one volume of the "Employee Accident Index" weighed in at 14lbs.


The other aspect that gave me pause was the time period covered - May 1942 through May 1945. This period obviously encompasses the majority of the second World War, an event that, again to understate it, changed the world. While millions of Americans were involved in conflict overseas millions more were going to work on the home front and yes, they periodically experienced injuries on the job which are chronicled row by row by row in the "Employee Accident Index". And our company's employees during that time were there to take care of them. The injuries weren't too much different then than we see today though certainly the frequency of industrial accidents has declined dramatically in the last 70 years. Reading through the employers listed reads like a who's who of Colorado companies with many of them still around today.

Opening the Index's heavy front hinged cover I came to a page where someone had, in beautiful cursive, inscribed the dates covered. They could have simply printed it, or even typed it, but it's clear some employee at our company took the extra time and extra effort to write it out in flowing script. Their message carried across the years - they took pride in their work then just as Pinnacol's employees take pride in the work we do today. As we experience a changing modern world its nice to reflect that we are not alone - we stand on top of the foundations left for us by those who came, and worked, and changed the world, before us.