drover:
1on4:
toonsy:
It’s not the minerva it once was as pay elsewhere has caught up with it.
I got offered a full time job but it took ten weeks and in that time I accepted and started another job. Far too pretentious for my liking. Its driving a lorry not a degree in quantum physics.
Incidentally my mate stuck at it and is now on with them. Full time. He’s currently a reserve and has been doing days to nights to date again with afternoons and reduced rests etc. It’s alright justifying it by saying “money” but you can’t spend it if you’re knackered or dead.
My husband works for RM and this isn’t anything like his experience. He’s been with them 11 years and there are 190 drivers at his site who have been there longer than him so it can’t be that bad 
But is your husband stuck on reserve duties though?
I know someone that left a supermarket job not long ago to go full-time with RM.
He left after 2 weeks because they stuck him on reserve duties but had promised him a particular 4 shift week when he took the job.
It certainly is not the job it was…,…
Having previously worked 5 years agency for them i would only consider going back if i was financially screwed up, but even then there’s much better out there now which year you much better& almost pay the same
At RM new starters are often on “Floater” until they pick into a fixed duty.
This means that he likely got the 4 day weeks for those first two weeks, but baulked in week 3 when he was asked to do 5 or 6 shorter shifts.
Essentially, “Floater” means you get put into any duty that is vacant due to staff absense (Holiday, Sick) by Balance of Staff admin worker @ RM. During the actual holiday season, the better duties (belonging to senior drivers) become available for floaters to cover.
What I used to do whilst at RM as a full timer was take my holidays during times when no senior driver was off (not that I could get the same holidays as them anyways…) which would mean I didn’t pick up the rubbish jobs in say, February and November, but then lined up several weeks worth of cushy duties to cover from around June to the end of October - where I took no holidays myself whatsoever.
That’s just my way of making the most out of being a “floater” which I was for more than a decade out of the 23 years I spent at RM in the end.
I wouldn’t pick into just any old duty that came along neither, as the cushy duties were often “dead man’s shoes” jobs… They rarely came up for grabs, and when they did - the higher seniority drivers would put in for it, making it futile for anyone lower down the pecking order to even worth bothering…
As for the duty’s “content” - that varies so much that literally one job could be the best job you’ve ever had, and the next job - rather hard graft, crappy hourage, and your break would be at the end of a “get back from somewhere in the rush hour” point of the day, so you’d get bollocked for being late, bollocked for not taking your break when the 318 said so, and bollocked for being daft enough to get stuck in traffic… Took an alternative route? - No Dice. I used to get bollocked for taking “short cuts” as well, to a legendary extent indeed… 
The simple answer - is avoid the crappy duties like the plague, best done by not picking into any of them, just because the hours look “nice” for your family life, etc. The stress you take home to your family - won’t be worth it. Trust me on that! 
