It isn't that you forgot them. It's that you took them off.
You put them on to move the sheet metal. Then there's a bolt to start, so off they come. Then a screw to pick up, then a wire nut to twist, then you've got to answer the phone — and by then they're on the tailgate and that's where they stay for the rest of the day.
Which means for the entire back half of the job, when your hands are tired and you're being less careful, you're working bare-handed.
That's when it happens. The rusted bracket you drag your knuckles across reaching for something. The corner of the frame rail. The splinter off a joist. The cinder block your hand slides down.
Past 55, that stops being a nuisance. Skin doesn't close the way it used to. A split knuckle at 30 is a scab. At 60 it's five weeks of catching the same wound on the same edge over and over.
The glove that protects you isn't the toughest one. It's the one you don't take off.