Author: Buck

You know that little incident I had last week with my TomTom (supposedly) Trucknav?

The one that nearly had me ringing the police and blubbing like a girl?

I got on to TomTom. There was no way to contact them on the ‘phone so I ended up in a protracted email exchange. I said that I’d looked it up and there were two versions of the model I have, one for cars and one for trucks. They said they only sold the lorry one, so I couldn’t have the car one. They told me to check my settings. I did. Then tried the test route again. (Irlam  to Lymm. The quickest route takes you down a B road and over a 3 ton bridge.)

It’s Sunday. It seems like a lifetime ago I was stressing about the induction.

That was Wednesday, I think. On Thursday I was in for my first shift. Surprisingly I slept OK, the problems on the road are are manageable because you are not being watched, so you can just work through them.

That is not quite the case, the trucks all have satellite trackers to monitor your every movement, stop, and speed. All trucks have tachographs which monitor your speed, when you stop, when you take your break, etc. Plus these one are fitted with a forward facing camera which activates every time you brake harshly, go over a bump, or hit anything. Apparently there has been a huge rise in false insurance claims. People pulling in front of trucks then slamming on the brakes. Claiming they had a car full of their mates, all of whom claim for whiplash.

Work has totally gone tits up with Ceva. 3 shifts, at random times and with no notice for two weeks on the trot, this week it has got to Wednesday with no work. They don’t work weekends, so best case two days work.

Then the agency called me on Tuesday and asked if I’d be OK to do the DHL/Iceland induction on Wednesday. It’s massively out of my comfort zone, but it always will be. You can’t move from trunking to store deliveries without adjustment. Now is a good time to do it as I’m getting no work at Ceva.

So I went for the induction. Again. My third time as a driver for that site. I failed the first one (I’d only just passed my test and had no experience.) I passed the second but bottled it and told the agency I didn’t want to work there.

Sorry, that’s a Twitter joke. Apparently two years ago today, at 1620 hrs, Ed Balls did a vanity search. ie, typed his name to see who was talking about him, but being a noob he sent it as a tweet instead of searching it. The tweet was therefore just: “Ed Balls”

For some reason this has gained massive traction as a meme and today is now Ed Balls day. My Twitter timeline was just a mass of Ed Balls today. He even tweeted it again. Bless.

Sorry, that was utterly pointless. A topical subject for my blog post title with no relevance or merit outside of it’s ‘in joke’ milieu. So, a neat metaphor for the internet.

So much for the easy life!

I thought after losing my regular run I would at least have a week off. Maybe struggle for a bit getting work until I found a new job. Nope. On Monday at about 1430hrs, as I was driving to Wales, the agency rang and asked if I could work at 1600 hrs. No.

I didn’t get any work Tuesday. On Wednesday I had gone out for a run, more of which in a minute, when Ceva called me direct (as opposed to ringing the agency) and asked if I could work from 2100hrs. I did. I was about an hour from finishing (about 0730hrs) when the agency rang and asked if I could start at Ceva from 10 o’clock. They had already got me a shift for 0600 hrs Friday so I said I couldn’t do it if they wanted me to do that one. They said ‘but that’s in the morning’. I thought they wanted me to work from 2200hrs, turns out they were asking me to work from 1000hrs! No again.