For about a year our debrief has involved the foreman asking a number of inane questions and ticking or crossing boxes on a piece of paper for each driver as necessary. Our depot is smaller than than the main depot so generally a lot more relaxed with only the relevant info given (how much fuel/ ad blu/ dropped or extra loads), things such as defects or tyre work are known long before it comes to debriefing. Most of this info is already covered by either the defect book or daily work sheets already. Rather than wait maybe a couple of hours for the foreman to get back into the yard it’s long been accepted by all of us that you fill in the sheet yourself and leave it for the foreman (or cover) to sign on his return, no issues whatsoever.
Recently, due to whoever is supposed to check through this pointless exercise back at the main depot wasting too much time reading 50-60 sheets daily they’ve changed it to a computer/ tab questionnaire with radio buttons for yes/ no, with some responses chucking out a box to enter specific details.
The foreman, the assistant foreman and one other driver have wasted half a day each being trained to use the laptop we’ve been provided with. It is quite comical watching log in attempts a few weeks in, none of them have memorised the password and the 2 finger typing approach usually leads to 3 or 4 failed log in attempts before success. The the questions in order ‘have you …?’, ‘yes’, ‘did you …?’ ‘no’, ‘why’, reason given. Day 1, with the TM present, ‘anything to add?’, ‘yes, this is taking too long’, he just laughed.
So, a couple of days ago the assistant foreman was taking a personal call and asked me to sort it out myself, which I duly did. He cleared off and the other ‘trained driver’ came into our office and opened up the laptop, I told him that I’d already done mine at the assistant foreman’s request, ‘who trained you?’, ‘no-one, I don’t need training to use a swear word laptop!’, ‘you mustn’t use this unless you’ve been trained, you might swear word it up’. ‘Yeah fine’, walked out and went home.
Saw the foreman next day, said that I’d had a run in with the other driver over it, he said that he’d heard and that when I finish earlier than one of the trained people I can either do my own or leave the paperwork for them to do it when back in the office.
I was in the office by myself yesterday morning when the phone rang, what should I do? I haven’t been trained to answer the phone, I might swear word it up by touching it. Decided that over 40 years experience in answering phones (we didn’t have a phone at home when I was a kid), a similar length of experience in using computers, should be enough to manage to take the call without catastrophe. Answered, took a message, relayed it to both the foreman and the driver it was intended for. No kittens came to harm.