Thanks for your reply David,
Sadly my inherent cynicism finds your reply both truthfully insightful and yet sad.
Dropping a tape occasionally is just what it is. Stretched out on a long laminate top to layout bridging and it flops over and falls on the floor. Hooked on your belt or pocket when you are just out for a quick measure and dont have your pouch on and you crouch down to pick up a sheet and your ever increasing muffin top overwhelms the lack of spring in the now no-springy belt clips and pops the tape off your belt un-bending the ever less springy belt clip permanently, then of course the new people in the shop who, no matter how much I want to delude myself that I am some phenom and learned all the nuances that help me through my day the nanosecond I exited the birth canal, have to learn things just as I did even with my never ending butter slathered tutelage.
Applying "sticky stuff" to the tape or the pouch is why we/I dont like rubber cased tapes. They dont drop into the pouch and often times hang right up at the top of the pouch/apron making them want to fall out or have to be fidgeted with. I supposed I could go the old marine route and if you drop your gun you get it glued to your hands but that has some issues of its own.
Installing plywood on sleepers seems a costly endeavor deal with the ever cheapening of products. In 30 years in the general contracting world I couldnt begin to count the times I watch a tape (often my own) bounce its way down a multi story roof to depart the edge and fall all the way to the ground only to be picked up by the ground man and lobbed back up to me to immediately go back into service. In the never ending drive to the bottom of the sludge layer at the bottom of the pickle barrel they have now wrung every thousandth of a cent of plastic, metal, paint, and decal thickness, out of these items to feed profit. Id like to investigate other options for tape measures before I resort to purging the entire shop of all tools, shutting down for a week or two, installing sleepers and a ply deck, and dealing with its shortcomings to boot.
Outsourcing would be a viable option if it were a viable option and I would surely consider it.
DRO's everywhere (due in part to a lot of your very wise and direct comments here) are inplace everywhere but a couple that are still in the process. "Digital calipers everywhere" are in place. DRO's on all but the couple machines are in place. Still doesnt mean checking a long diagonal or pulling out a tape a bunch of times a day will be eliminated but agreed. Reducing tapes and pulling pencils out of aprons to as close to zero as possible equals speed, accuracy, and profit. Daily mantra for me.
Last, Retirement is something not in my near future unless the Powerball ticket I never buy finally hits big so I have to continually hope I can find a tape measure something like the chrome stanley's I bought for the last 30 years. As stated... Dewalt pretty much destroys everything it comes in contact with.. so the search continues.
I literally just ordered a bunch of Hultafors pencils and on recommendation in this post am looking into their tape's. Even if they live in the apron 99.9% of their life I'd rather buy a decent one.