The HGV MOT Test, my experiences!

As a youngster I found it all really rather intimidating presenting a vehicle for test. Bert at Hastings was certainly not averse to dishing out bollockings if something was wrong and he thought it wasn’t an arguable point. After the test was completed on the lane at Gillingham you had to take the paperwork to senior T.O. Mr Daniels for him to scrutinise and actually write out the pass certificate. Heaven help you if you didn’t start off with a polite and reverent ‘Good Morning MISTER Daniels’. It was most definitely true that you needed to be ‘a face’ who turned up regularly, to avoid being picked up on the most minor of pedantic issues. Once you got known these seemed to miraculously get overlooked. That doesn’t mean they were all ogres - there were some really good blokes doing the job, who had been on the tools for years, unlike today when some seem to be the product of a two day course.