Hi there. The title is a reference to Apocalypse Now, in case any one missed it. I’ve sent my T.A. application back. If all goes (well?) to plan that should be the start of it. Back to the army. Different war, same shit. Saigon….shit! Got to be done. I need trucking experience to get a decent civvy driving job. The catch 22 is they won’t give you a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. So I’m screwed. Work is really pissing me off. They keep telling me they don’t know when the new trucks are arriving. They have just paid shit loads of thousands of pounds for these trucks, you’d think they’d have some interest and idea when they were actually going to arrive. It’s not like they could have been lost in the post, they are bloody great big things, hard to mislay.In the mean time I have been plodding on in my role as an order picker. Now they’ve gone and screwed that up as well. We have a minimum pick target we have to hit each shift, but now they have slowed the trucks down and expect us to still hit our target figure. And they are gearing up for xmas, so we had to do a 2-10 yesterday (Saturday night!) and because there was no work for us in grocery they sent us all into the freezer. They joy never stops. So I’ve seen my arse, spat my dummy and generally am miffed. Off to the army I jolly well (try to) go. In an odd kind of way I would like a tour of duty in a ‘hot’ warzone. Last time we were all primed but it was a (desert) storm in a teacup. They told us we were being sent out as bait (to get killed so they could discover the position of the Iraqi artillery) and we were to man our guns and keep doing the job even if our best mate was lying screaming next to us, then…..nothing. We got away with only a handful of deaths. (on our side.) Kind of hard to get over that. All steeled and prepared then no release. Anywho, in a way it would be good to get back to it. The manager I previously discussed the T.A. with was saying that if I do get mobilised (and the CD ROM the army sent me said, reading between the lines, ‘you will get mobilised’) work has to pay me whilst I’m on active service and the army pays me as well. And I get all the driving experience I need. The M6 will seem a bit tame after that. Going to have issues with Wendy over this. She thinks it would be a bit of a risky venture. One thing at a time. I might not get in. I might not be mobilised. If I am mobilised it might not be in warzone. If I am mobilised in a warzone I […]
Continue readingTag: Employment
Ennui kills!
Oh my! I’ve been sat at home now for a week, scared to do much online shopping because I don’t know if I have a job or not, and getting more and more bored. I have been window shopping for jobs the last couple of days, but I can’t really commit until I am definitely sacked, as they are all crap in one way or another. There is one advertising in Manchester, Trafford Park, which is just down the motorway. He’s willing to take on new drivers, but the traffic into Manchester is a nightmare, it would involve nights out, and the pay is £7.25 and hour! So, spend five and a half grand to take a twenty percent pay cut! Obviously if I am sacked I would have to apply. Just now I was looking again for jobs, and, through a link to another job site, came across an advert for drivers, 19-43 years old, to go and get blown up in some godforsaken corner of the globe. So I’ve applied! Military Driver, Royal Logistics Corps, Territorial Army. Larf! It says you have to be able to put in at least nineteen days a year, but as soon as they’ve got you doubtless you’ll be sent out on tours of duty. Wendy was OK with it until I suggested that it might involve active duty. I really do have a lethally low boredom threshold. We’ll see, I might not even get an answer. If I’m not sacked, work would have to be cool about it as well. My fitness is tolerable, I have the mental where-with-all to be able to take army life now, and it would be a sterling commendation on any driving CV. And if it was only for short bursts, and I don’t get blown up, could be quite fun. Things you do! Buck.
Continue readingSax and bugs, not even dole.
The nasty enervating illness I have been labouring through is waning. To prove that every cloud has a silver lining (and that where there’s a will there’s a platitude) it seems to have sapped my will to worry about work. If I get sacked I’ll just have to deal with it, at least I’ve got a week off, paid. And if I’m not sacked I didn’t have to work through that nasty cold. It was weird, I didn’t have a runny nose, or anything much except a little bit of a cough and tired eyes, but I just felt so weak I barely felt able to stand up. That and a temperature. Bad, but brief. Three days, and I was on the mend yesterday. Which reminds me, I need to swab out my sax mouthpiece now, in case it’s possible to reinfect myself! The sax is coming along apace. I have two books; "Learn as you play saxophone", and "A new tune a day for tenor saxophone." The former is the one my sax-sensei Pete teaches from, the latter is more challenging. Both want me to read music and play at the same time in chapter 1. That really is challenging! Pete asked me if I had any musical experience, I said I could play the triangle but subsequently confessed I could not read music. He said it was alright, that people often learnt as they went along, but I sensed an inward sigh. I think I’m doing well though. In the space of a week I’ve gone from blowing like mad and being pleased I got something that sounded like a note, to expecting to hit each note of the middle (damn, lingo breakdown! Not sharp or flat, the middle bunch of notes! Damn , damn, damn!) octave, and worrying about keeping to 4/4 or 3/4 time! (You go girl!) Wendy, whilst appreciating the rate and degree of my improvement, is less than ecstatic about my practising. Hearing someone try over and over to get the right time and notes of ‘Chanson de nuit’ and ‘Au clair de la lune’ whilst you are trying to have a quiet chill must be irritating. Did I mention the soundproofing was a flop? The egg-trays are apparently an urban myth, they give you wonderful acoustics, but don’t stop next-door from appreciating them. Genuine sound insulation relies on density and thickness. I briefly examined a professional soundproofing site, worked out that one wall of a soundproof box would cost around £500, then gave up. I have resorted to the old standbys of a thick pair of socks down the horn, and practising my fingering without the mouthpiece in (on top of the hour’s blowing). The socks are, at best, a token gesture. There are that many holes in a sax that the horn is just the final projecting bit. I’ve taken to sitting in the hall upstairs, with all the bedroom doors, the bathroom door and the front-room door downstairs shut (so there […]
Continue readingNot a ‘no’
Just a quick a update before I trot off to work. I went into the office four times yesterday to try and see Tony (the site manager) and each time he was in a meeting or doing other important stuff. On the fourth attempt I saw a middle manager I know (Murray) and he said he’d go into the meeting and ask Tony what the news was. Tony came straight out and saw me in person. He said that we are getting new rigid (class II) trucks next month so, subject to them being able to sort out the insurance (which he saw no reason why they couldn’t as they’d run warehouse-to-wheels on other sites with the same insurance) his plan was to send me out in an old rigid to do deliveries. His reasoning being it would get me used to driving a laden truck (up to eighteen tons on the back, as opposed to the empty ones you learn to drive in), get used to the stores and doing the job, and it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I put the odd scratch on an old truck whilst getting the hang of it. This is brilliant in several ways; it says that they have been thinking about me and how best to get me trained up, not just saying ‘we don’t know yet, come back again next week’, they are not expecting me to start off perfect, so I don’t have to think that one scrape and I’m sacked, and it would be days! This would be fantastic news for Wendy. Also the pay is the same whatever I’m driving. He said that they’d see how I went on, then upgrade me to artic’s in January if I was OK. At which point Murray chipped in that where he was they had w-t-w, and to get the new drivers good at reversing they put them on shunting for a week. That is just picking up trailers from one place in the yard then reversing on to a dock at some other point. Then repeat. For twelve hours a day! All in all I found his immediate response, and credible plan quite encouraging. I wasn’t just being told what I wanted to hear or being kept in suspense. Hope springs. In other news here are the promised photo’s: The suit, twenty or so quid off eBay, perfect fit, natty as a spiv’s ‘tache. The hand made to order winklepickers! Words cannot express the coolness. The rented sax (so she thinks! It shall be mine!) the ensemble! Tres Bleeding chic! Oh yes! Cooler than a penguins chilly bits! What with being able to blow a C already (apparently that is the note you produce if you blow down it without depressing any of the keys) I only have seven more notes to learn and I’m fluent! End of the week I’m predicting. Gotta go, Buck.
Continue readingIt’s all about now.
Hi. I’m nervous now. Today is supposed to be the day. I have to go in and see the site manager, my bezzie mate/ total bastard, Tony Simpson today. This is it. My future hangs in the balance. If he says I can go driving then I’ll be ecstatic but terrified, if he says I can’t I’ll start applying for jobs in earnest. The third, and worst, option is that he says ‘I’ll get back to you’ (again). So far this has been a happening week; Wendy and I compromised on the sax, I’m initially renting it for four months to see if I can take to it and stick to it, but I now have a sax! (Pictures to follow, got to go to work in a bit.) I even got a noise out of it! I wouldn’t go so far as to claim it was a note, but it was better than the breathless wheeze I seem to remember achieving the last time I owned one. My shoes finally arrived today, six days too late for the do to which I intended to wear them, but stunning none the less. Hand made to order, which explains the delay, but not the claim of a ten day turn around made by the website. My 0% interest credit card came yesterday, I’ve transferred that huge debt I ran up for my driving lessons (for which they had recently upped the interest repayment to ninety pounds a month!) and we will easily be able to settle that before we start incurring interest again. So now it’s just the job. I’m scared if he says ‘yes’, as when I said I would like to go out with a driver for a week to build up my experience safely, he changed it to ‘an assessor, yes’. If that is the case I’d feel like I was on my driving test for a whole week! If he says ‘no’, then the panic subsides until such times as I can actually get someone to give me an interview, never mind a job. If, as I’m expecting, he says ‘I’ll get back to you’, I’ll be miffed, but I have no choice but to hang in there. Well, good, bad or indifferent, I’ll let you know tomorrow. Also I’ll post pictures of my eBay bargain suit, so-cool shoes, and unspeakably cool sax. Fingers crossed, Buck.
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