THE GOOD 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.) The satnav told me to take the bridge. In a 40 ton, 53’ artic. I told them. They said I had to turn my notifications on. I found the buggers hidden in a sub section of the menu. They were on and had never warned me about a height/ weight/ width restriction or dead end. I told them. And so it went. I was looking up different devices in the lag between emails. I came across one called a Snooper. It actually does all the things the TomTom had claimed to. Guide you on suitable roads, avoid restrictions, warn of speed cameras, etc. They had links to several articles where they’d won the best trucknav category from Truckers World (or whatever) for the last three years running. There were three different publications and they’d all said the Snooper was hands down the best kit. After I’d sent my last email and heard nothing for several hours I thought they’d given up on me. Their whole attitude was that I was doing it wrong and their kit was bob on. I thought “Screw it!” I went and bought a Snooper. £400! I need it if I’m doing store deliveries all over the place. My job depends on it. later that evening TomTom emailed me saying they were going to put an upgrade on my account. I plugged in and it automatically downloaded and upgraded me to all of Europe maps, car or Truck mode. No such option prior. I clicked truck mode, suddenly it was saying “confirm settings; 40 ton, 53’3” long, 13 ton axle weight, starsign Gemini, favourite colour blue, etc”  I tried the test route; perfect. Obviously. Bollocks. Now I have two perfectly splendid satnavs. One for a snip at £355 the other a bargain at £399. Still, I need one for the job. Then they said I’d got my old run back at Ceva. Trunking from Irlam to Aspatria to Crewe and back to Irlam. Which I can do blindfolded. Ho ho ho ho. *beats self senseless with irony stick*   So that was hilarious. I immediately decided I wanted another job. I can’t be arsed with being Ceva’s agency bitch. Iceland take on from the agency and it’s good money I happen to […]

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. So, in that instance it is good tech, as it protects the lorry driver. However, it also activates if you clip a kerb, or go over a speed bump. So every incident is recorded and can be cross referenced with your speed and location to determine if you were speeding or not paying due care and attention. You have to just drive like normal, with an eye to the speedo, and try not to think about being monitored every single minute. And hope you don’t get lost. Anyway, I was OK about it the night before, and fairly relaxed about it on the day. It was a bit of a flap trying to suss out the new paperwork and the correct procedures, but that was to be expected. My main worry was the stores. Iceland bought out half of the Woolworth stores when they went tits up, so it’s loads of town centre, poxy little places. My first day was two local drops, I forget where, then back to base to take out a second trailer. The stores were less than ideal to access, but within my ability. The second day was just two stores. Harder, but still manageable. I was getting cocky, thinking I had worried over nothing. Then on Saturday they sent me to Salford (a store delivery point on the roof of the complex, loads of really, really tight corners) then Macclesfield. Up until Macc the combination of satnav and the driver-written notes had got me everywhere perfectly. Not Macc. The satnav took me by a car route. I ended up down a twisty country lane a few hundred feet from a narrow, height restricted bridge. The road signs leading up had said ‘low bridge, 1 mile’ the satnav had seemed to say my turning was just before it. I got there and was totally stuck. I was an inch and three quarters too tall for the bridge. There was an open gate into a farmers field to one side, a mile of twisty B road to reverse down to the last turn off, or a […]

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. This one was, as ever, a nerve wracking event. They said turn up for 0600 for a six hour induction. Five of us turned up. They started us off with a breathalyser for alcohol and a urine test for other drugs. Then there were two. Three of the drivers failed the drugs test! So that was a good start. After that we went out for an assessment drive. The one good thing about that is the fact that the whole of DHL/Iceland’s fleet (out of that site, anyway) is automatic gearbox, which is one less thing to worry about. You guessed it. They had rented some manual gearbox trucks! D’oh! A few issues with the gearbox (and the fact that the trailers were twin axle not triple, which oddly means you take the right line for a corner, glance in your mirror and your trailer is heading for the pavement! Weird.) aside it was an OK drive. I passed that. Then there was the written test, road signs, driver hours regulations, geographical knowledge (on which I only got two wrong! Ha!) etc. Then it was death-by-powerpoint. From about 0900 to gone 1500. I’d hardly slept the night before with nerves, up at ungodly o’clock, then once I’d passed the three test (drugs/ alcohol, assessment/ written) I relaxed. The mind numbing boredom of sitting through hours of slides on safe lifting/ manual handling, coupling a trailer (!), and a gazillion other things we already knew was tantamount to human rights abuse. The worst of it was by the time we were finally released and I should have been able to celebrate I had a stinking headache. Bah. In the course of the day we chatted about me having worked there in the warehouse and I said how I’d originally taken my training to do ‘warehouse to wheels’. As you know that amounted to nothing after we’d spent all that money on training to get my licenses. The induction guy said “They’ve just started three guys on warehouse to wheels. One already had his license but they are putting the other two through theirs.” […]

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. You’re welcome.   Work is mad as a carrot at the minute. I had three days in, a night shift and two day shifts. I’m so far out of my comfort zone I might as well wear cactus underpants. I had a run to Bristol with an absolute bitch of a reverse. The bays had inches between them and restricted area to the front to line it up. Luckily when I went there were several empty bays so I had room to swing the trailer wide. I’d have still been there now if, as sometimes happens there, there was an extra row of trucks parked to the front and a trailer either side, and having to blind side it in.  That’s how tight it is, you can’t even go in on the drivers side, leaning out of the window, you sometimes have to go in using your offside mirror and getting out and checking every few inches. Like I say, I was lucky. Then they sent me out on a multidrop. The fun thing about that was they gave me a sheet with my drops on, a company name (for some of them) a general area (Deeside industrial park) and a postcode. That meant I had no idea where I was going and just had to blindly follow my satnav. Except they gave me the wrong postcode for the Deeside one so I ended up driving around a little housing estate in Mold.  I had to spin a bloody great artic around in the street, go along B roads and when I’d got to the wrong location ask for the right place. It was a nightmare. Then they sent me back to Bristol again, in the daytime so the yard was empty (yay!) but Bristol then sent me to a further two drops around the area. One in Bristol town centre. Tight little corners with stupid roads and every dickhead with a car out to have me kill them. If you’ve got a tight corner that means the arse end is going to swing wide, I was convinced I was going to wipe some of the dickheads out who were trying to come past me. I meant to check my trailer when I got back to see if I had hit anyone. When […]

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. They got me an 1800hrs shift that day, so I ended up having less than 6 hours kip after a 24 hour day the day before. I got a bit of a lie in on Friday, then back in for 2100hrs. I turned up for the Friday shift to be told I was doing multiple drops, not my nice and easy trunking. On a time-sensitive job (getting newspapers moved) to addresses I’d never been. Ace. I got my keys and paperwork and asked if I was taking an empty trailer. They looked at my reg and said ‘no, that’s a rigid.’ Double ace. I hate rigids. It had a tail lift (the operation of which is a mystery to me) and when I got in I realised it was a manual gearbox. My joy was boundless. It turned out to be not too bad, but it was a hell of a shock to the system. The thing being, my supposed easy life week was way more stressful and knackering than a ‘normal’ week. Good in a way though, as I was looking on the jobcentre site and there was bugger all decent work. If it doesn’t get better I’ll be looking again. This is too much like hard, knackering, work.   That run I mentioned didn’t help. It was my first one since that nasty cold I had. I seemed to remember that running from our house, to Sankey Valley park and along the canal to the Widnes/ Runcorn bridge and back was about 12 miles. I hated it. You’ll remember my last run was the Bolton Hill Marathon which was as tough as old boots and I managed that comfortably. This time I just wanted to stop the whole time. Not slow down or turn back early, stop. That was right from the start. Bad, bad, bad. I gritted my teeth and made it to the end of the canal […]