Hi, We have just returned from Wendy’s sister’s (Gail). That was eventful. Wendy’s brother and his wife (Peter and Emma) came with us in the mighty Micra to the outskirts of Brum. Some people claim that Daventry, being a further fifty miles down the country, is not actually in Birmingham. To these geographical pedants we merely say: well you’re not going to admit you live in Brum, are you? So, first the journey there. Four of us in the Micra. It’s only a 1000cc engine, with 90,000 miles on the clock, no air conditioning, the mechanism on one of the windows is knackered and it was a mad hot day. A recipe for joy in that simple description. Also, unbeknownst to us when we arranged it, we had chosen to go on the same weekend they were hosting the flower show at Birmingham NEC, which was plugged ceaselessly on (may I say in passing, the best for a long time) Gardeners World the night before. When we finally got clear of the weirdness of the jams (come to a complete stop, then speed up to.., seventy miles an hour, m’lud. Yet at no point did we come across a cause for the stopping.) obviously I put the Micra into the sports setting (I shut the drivers door window) and went for it. You’ll believe a Micra can fly. That was a relief. Then they closed the road, sending us on a huge diversion that left us in the middle of nowhere. The Bullring is lovely at this time of year so we whiled away the time waiting for Gail to send her beau to come and find us. When we got there there were all the usual antics of family get-togethers; the beer, the small talk to partners you don’t know, the herds of kids, etc. It went quite well (there were no fights, nobody died, we are all still talking to each other) and Gail, bless her, pulled out all the stops to accommodate us, and trying to make bbq food for a veggie is, to be honest, about as far as sanity and civility can be pushed. But you know how it is, you want your own bed and a complete absence of noise, social interaction and children. (Or is that just me?) To be fair, Gail’s young ‘un, Brett, was fine, a sterling youth. I expect the others were, individually, upstanding pillars of juvenile rectitude, but en masse they blend into a mob, one video game short of barbarity, anarchy and possibly cannibalism. (Again, it is possible that that is just my non-paternal impression.) We made it, none the less. Also it strikes me; perchance I should adopt a personal pronoun (to avoid erroneous inference being drawn from my ramblings.) Me. myself, and I. In other news, I am back on the pick now. I have my rota (every other weekend off, woo-hoo!) and am achieving my pick figure without any problems. If I can just stay […]
Continue readingAuthor: Buck
Driving test
Guess what? I failed. Again. 🙁 Damn and blast! It was even the same route I took last test, I came up to that same painted island, though ‘HA!! I’ll have you this time.’ Then as I went into it, started to steer around it! How stupid am I? I knew what was coming, was prepared for it, and still did the reflex thing. I mounted the pavement with my trailer wheel, hit myself in the head quite hard, and called myself a fucking stupid prick. Which, is not quite the right approach. You are told to be casual about mistakes and hope the examiner has not noticed. I feel he may have noticed that one. After that I went to pieces a bit. I made two other (serious) mistakes. I tried to drive through a filter light when the (right turn) green arrow had gone off. I failed my rigid test on the same thing, and swore I’d never get caught out by that again. I stopped the truck, but was sure one of my instructors had said you could carry on if the arrow went off, so started off again. STOP! Red light. (Turns out I was getting confused. The instance when you can proceed, is when the filter light goes out, but the lights are still on green. In this instance the green was for straight ahead, the right turn arrow had it’s own red light which was telling all who are not muppets not to try to turn right. Now it makes sense. Better too late than never.) The other mistake was my perennial problem: oncoming vehicle, parked car on my side, fag papers clearance, carried on confidently. Bad Buck! No biker heroics allowed. If there is less than a doors width slow to a crawl, or as the examiner said; ‘I would have held back there.’ So, three stupid fail marks, all of which I have failed on before. Unbelievable. The positives are; the other bit where I failed on that route last time I passed with flying colours. Took both lanes, made it easy for myself, and easily got through the turn. After that I got a tast for hogging both lanes and the tight turns suddenly became very do-able. So, I have to slow it right down approaching every situation and not be a dickhead. I just need someone of a nagging and nervous disposition to shout at me every time it looks like I’m about to kill myself and all of those around me. I don’t think Wendy is allowed on my test though. In other news, I have been kicked out of de-kit now. I am back to being a picker (in grocery/ ambient so far) which is OK by me. I’ve only done two half days and one full day (yesterday) and already I’ve noticed they are giving out the good picks to a select few so the rest of the lads have to struggle to get there target. There […]
Continue readingJolly hols/ honeymoon
Hi, we made it! All the way to Inverness, within spitting distance of the famous Loch Ness. Yeah verily, it rocked! The journey wasn’t too much fun, the poor little Micra being thrashed mercilessly for seven or so hours each way. Two hundred and forty miles of toe-down motorway, then another one hundred and thirty three miles of (actually very good, fast, and challenging) ‘A’ roads. Poor little Micra. Some of those hills go on forever. We had been warned previously, so I was able to…, make sure I was maintaining my usual law abiding progress, but there were two cops on the motorway bridges, and a third in one of those ambush vans when we hit Scotland. The roads get empty, there is nothing and no-one for you to hit, and coppers everywhere. Go figure, as the colonials would have it. That aside, the drive into Scotland was grand in every sense of the word. It’s so BIG! Massive countryside and it just keeps on coming. The roads are a bikers dream. Even in the mighty Micra they were superb. Get around there on a Japanese pocket rocket…wow! You wouldn’t even have to kill yourself, the roads are so good. Enough rhapsodising about the application of Mr Mc Adams finest. We arrived more or less on time, having barely got lost, but couldn’t at first find the caravan. We rang Bonnie (the owner, nice person) up and found we had gone past it. We were relieved and gutted in equal measure. We had just (after driving for three hundred and seventy seven miles) realised I hadn’t checked to see if was just an internet scam. That would have been irksome. It looked to be genuine so we were relieved, but we had just passed a shabby, ill used caravan so we were at best apprehensive. When we retraced our route Bonnie was stood outside and directed us in. The caravan was hidden around the back, completely screened by trees on all sides, and in a large field on its own. Joy! The caravan was lovely, the setting idyllic, the vista picturesque. Splendid. We just chilled that evening, knackered as we were from the travelling. Later on I was waiting for it to get properly dark so we could see the stars. There were no street lights and no urban pollution so I thought I would get an unparalled view. Half ten and it was dusk, eleven, still dusk, twenty to twelve and you could still read a book in the light that was left! I gave up and went to bed. Land of the midnight sun! We decided to go out to see Loch Ness and Urqhart castle the next day. I went searching high and low and couldn’t find my camera. I found the spare batteries, the battery charger, but no bloody camera, and I’d just bought a memory card specifically for this holiday. Bastard. Not to let it mar the holiday we went and did the tourist […]
Continue readingDamn the DSA and all who sail on her!
Balls! Failed again. Happily I thrive on despair and disappointment. The worst thing is; both of the incidents that lead to the fail were avoidable. One of them was trying to steer around one of those painted white traffic islands (in a truck they are usually impossible, you make a token effort to show you’ve seen it then run it over anyway) which meant I mounted a pavement. The other incident was two fails in one, I came up to a set of traffic lights. At the lights the road split in a Y with a little dividing island between the diverging lanes. As I approached I saw the left turn was going to be tight and considered taking the right lane as well. That had a line of traffic in it so I thought, what the hell, I can make it. Which left me an almost impossibly tight turn. So I was inching forward, getting as close as I possibly could to the dividing island, then looking back to check I was going to clear the pavement with my trailer. Inch forward, check front and mirrors, inch forward, "STOP!" The bastard lights had changed to red! D’oh! Then, when I set off, because of the position I’d left myself in, I nearly took out a railing. In the de-brief the examiner said, apart from running the lights, everything was down to approaching each situation too fast. If I’d have slowed down and given myself time to think… Still, those are (another) two mistakes I’ll never make again and I can learn from my mistakes, I should be running out of mistakes to make soon! Ho hum, tired Bucky. Later, Buck. 🙁
Continue readingI knew it!
Hi. It’s official, finally. We are being kicked out of our department. They finally came clean today. Perhaps it’s due to the tactics of industrial action/ sabotage we have been unofficially employing. We let the whole department go to shit. You could barely move for the pallets and rubbish. We slowed down to a walking pace (we had de-kitted seven trailers by breakfast one morning, where we normally have been looking at around twenty) so they were forced to send senior management to oversee every shift (we were abusing the junior management). Then we stood back and let the management try and run it, when they had no idea how it all operates. Finally on Saturday the shift manager for the whole site came up and told us we were desperate for sixty trailers and I laughed. She said "You used to be able to do that many" I replied "That was before we were getting kicked out of our jobs." She denied all knowledge, as have all the managers I’ve been challenging about it, but I think the message finally got home. Today they started taking us in, one by one, to be officially informed. I was the first of the lads to be taken in. So to speak (I wasn’t taken in for a second!) The 2IC (second in command) for the whole site sat and gave me a five minute waffle about how they needed to outsource to specialist recycling operatives to ensure full separation of the de-kitted materials in an hours relevant manner. Which translate as: they want to give our jobs to Eastern European agency workers. Reading between the yuppie-ese jargon, they want them to come in, magically separate the card, poly, and crap (when half of the time it arrives in huge cardboard containers, so you can’t see in it until you’ve tipped it into the baler, the top layer by which you judge it’s contents often being camouflage for the crap contained beneath) then as soon as they have finished all the trailers send them home. Even if this wasn’t unscrupulous, callous, and exploitative, it is still wrong. We take three shifts to keep up with the workload, and I’m here to tell you it is graft! That is twenty four hours a day, except for Weekend nights. If they are trying to run it on less men then we employ, they simply won’t get the job done. They can’t save on the wages bill therefore, and every other department will suffer the knock on effect. So hardy-har-har (he says, maturely). The good news is if that talk today is to be believed, they will let us choose our department upon leaving de-kit. So I don’t have to return to the dreaded freezer. Huge silver lining. However, that muppet today is not to be believed wholesale. He asked if there was anything I would like to say (at the end of his self-important waffle) and I told him, for future reference, if he’d […]
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