Month: April 2012

Plan.

First things first; go the tories. They announce a drought and it’s not stopped pissing it down ever since. As with their genius notion of kick-starting the economy by sacking everyone. I know it wasn’t the tories who announced the drought, but I’m blaming them. Tories announce a drought, build an ark. Wettest. Drought. EVER. I’ve been chugging up and down the M6 in it every day. Total monsoon. The spray makes it hellish difficult to see. I commented the other day that after that day’s driving I was going to have to get the barnacles scraped off the keel on my truck.   The ‘plan’ of the heading refers to my new short-term master-plan. I’m on 11.30- 23.00-ish shifts at the minute, so saxophony is out of the question. The neighbours wouldn’t like an early morning rendition and I’m be blowing a tune every time I farted if I played it when Wendy was in bed. I did try to take the clarinet in to work with me, as lots of the job is just sitting around waiting. But I felt a bit embarrassed because I’m so bad at it. Then it struck me, a soprano saxophone! They are tiny little things (they look about 18 inches tall, the curved ones) but share the same keys as all sax’s. I didn’t want to go lashing out on another instrument though. Gawd knows we have enough to spend our cash on. Then I struck upon it, sell the clarinet and buy the soprano! Genius! That way I could concentrate on one instrument, not trying to learn two lots of keys, fingerings, and bloody embouchure. It would pass the many, many, boring hours and it would be easily portable. Plus, as it is the same, but smaller, I should be able to play it sufficiently to avoid embarrassment. I’ve acted upon it. I’ve listed the clarinet on ebay. And the satnav holder thing I bought (then had the original returned to me). Also, it has given me motivation to start actions to get the Micra scrapped.  As soon as someone calls back with a quote that will be gone. Then it’s soprano city, baby!   Last week we finally got rid of our old, moribund cooker. I’ve had the replacement cooker selected and bookmarked for about a year on my favourites. There is never going to be a time when we say, ‘ we’ve got this spare £500, what the hell can we spend it on?’ So necessity was the mother of investment. The old cooker had lost it’s joie de vivre, and most of the heat. Very inconsistent temperatures. The new one is groovy. Two electric ovens. Fan assisted. Gas rings. Self cleaning. Well, I say self cleaning, part of buying a tory cooker is that they send a working class serf around weekly to clean it out. If not I’m sending it back.   The first night we got it I went and got us a Chinese so we […]

Continue reading

Once again the gods mock me.

You know how in my last  but one blog, of but a few days ago, I was waxing triumphant of my mastery in my chosen trade? To whit, I felt I’d cracked the driving gig? Wednesday I was doing my the same run I’ve been on for the last couple of weeks. My last drop being in Northampton. It’s a nice big yard, but the bay you have to reverse on is the to the far left of the yard. This means, when they leave trailers parked in front of it, you have to reverse in blind side. It’s exactly the same principle, except you can’t lean out of your cab window and see where you are going. You have to do it all in your offside mirror. The problem with that, of course, it that it leaves you without any depth perception. You are reduced from binocular vision to a flat, reflected field. When your arse end is over forty foot away this is less than ideal. So I was blind siding into this bay, the last one in the yard, trying not to run too far and park it over the pavement running next to my bay. I went tight around a parked unit and trailer (it would have been too easy if they hadn’t parked that there as well. Grrr.) I bottled it, thinking I’d gone too tight, so pulled forward again. As I did so I clipped the parked unit’s wing mirror with my trailer. Bollocks. I didn’t break it, or even scuff it, but I turned the mirror around on it’s post. This loosened it so it had to be fixed. The yard manager saw it and made me fill in an accident form. I think he was pulling a fast one, to be honest. One of the lads took the back off the mirror and fixed it while I was there. Then the repair guy came out, had a long talk with the manager and buggered off. I think it was a conversation on the lines of ‘lets bill the agency guy’s lot for a none existent repair and split the cash’. Probably not, but I was miffed.   I went into work on Thursday (my lot had gone home by the time of the accident so I didn’t get to tell them on Wednesday) and the boss was so concerned about me being a potentially dangerous driver he said I’d have to do a driving assessment on Friday. Meanwhile, here’s the keys, do the same run again today. Go figure, as the colonials would have it. This is why I am an agency driver; because I flap terribly on assessments. If I can carry on driving without ever having to take one I am not going to put myself through it. As soon as he said that I was gutted. I started planning what jobs I could apply for next. I had to go in early yesterday (Friday) to take the assessment. I […]

Continue reading

Drive.

I remember, many months ago, the first time someone hailed me with “Drive!” Which is short for ‘driver’, obviously, and how one addresses a lorry driver. I was at once pleased and terrified. I wanted to be that trucker, but felt I in no way earned the title. I had the licenses, and was doing the job, just about, but didn’t know what I was doing. There are so many things to pick up; little things like working the air suspension (so you can lower the cab to pull out from under a trailer and raising it when you reverse under one so you engage properly) and working the different onboard computers to check the oil level and such. Then there was the big things; knowing where your back end was when you were cornering in the dark and reversing. It’s only the last few weeks I’ve actually started to feel I can handle whatever is thrown at me. I’ve been doing easy trunking jobs with a few challenging bits per shift. The same company had me back after that Friday off, but on a different run. The first day my all-singing, all-dancing, £357 trucknav went tits up. I had been on the same run for weeks so hadn’t used it. That day I dropped my smartphone down the bog. It was still drying out and not working when I went to work. They gave me a new run, so I put the address in my Tomtom trucknav, which promptly died. I couldn’t get the navigation software on my ‘phone to work for ages and was going up and down the same road for about an hour looking for a road that was off the next motorway turn off. The Tomtom had got a leap-year ‘millennial bug’, ie, it hadn’t accounted for the leap day so couldn’t connect with all the satellites that had. It transpired that in messing with my ‘phone (before the screen had dried out and was working again) I’d turned off the data connection jobby, so it couldn’t connect to the network to guide me. When I eventually sussed that out it got me to the postcode but was guiding me into a housing estate. I resisted. Did about three laps of the one way system in Stoke on Trent, which let me tell you was designed for donkeys, not even horse and carriage. Getting an artic around there was a challenge in itself. I could see the building I was after, I did a complete lap of it without seeing a way in. In the end I tried the housing estate. I got funnelled down a little street, slaloming past parked cars, until I got to a corner with a van on one side and a car on the other, and no way for me to fit through. I was stuck. I tried knocking on the houses to get the vehicles moved, no answer. I was going to have to slalom, in reverse, right out […]

Continue reading