Well lads and lasses, it’s been an interesting few months!
Actually that’s a lie, it’s been a terrible few months, but hey-ho, such is the struggle of a young person trying to find a full-time job just about anywhere in the UK right now.
Up until the end of April I’d been pretty comfy with how things were going. I was working a good 4-5 days a week at my usual job and speaking to various companies here and there, no real urgency to push myself into class 2 driving, I’d send out forms and speak to a few owners and managers that I knew, bide my time, etc… and then my usual job had to go to hell. Call me stupid, but taking your one and only warehouseman and telling him he’s reduced back to contracted hours (three days a week) and then bringing in another young lad who can’t tell his rear end from his elbow to work on a full-time contract and effectively give him control of the warehouse… it seems a bit thick. But hey, I’m not one of those intelligent types that supermarkets seem to promote into their management, so what do I know? Lo and behold the job’s become terrible, so I decide to myself it’s time to get out and start asking about full-time elsewhere in the business. ‘Full time? We don’t do that anymore, it’s too inflexible, if you go on holiday who’s going to cover you. But if you want, you can have as much overtime as you like.’ (Which only lasts until they run out of money twice or thrice a year and cut it down to 0, leaving you with rent to pay and not enough pennies to stretch.) I got sick of being dumped on and then asked to do them a favour, so I started pushing myself properly into driving.
My area (Carlisle/Dumfries) isn’t exactly lush with class 2 jobs, but a few pop up now and then and I put in for them all. Some I heard back from, and even got a few interviews with, but they all had the same result. (Ah, you’re new AND young? Well… not sure we can take the risk!) Until I came to one company where the boss turned right around and offered me a day’s paid work to prove I was up for the job. Brilliant! … 'course, he had to phone me back the next day to say that his insurance company wasn’t going to allow it, fair enough he was honest and up front about it, said to call him back in a few months and see if the situation changed but who knows where I’d be then?
So a few nights ago, having exhausted every option aside from sitting on my hands until new jobs came about, I decided to have a shot at signing up for a few agencies in the area, I figured maybe a few would take me on, and I’d be doing the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff for a good long while… didn’t even get that far. ‘Sorry, but while we’re keen to support new drivers and add them to our pool, you’ve only had your license four months and we require at least six months driving in the last two years’ Was the rough reply I got from several, which is just extracting the urine on a whole new level. If I were a driver with 6 months under my belt, it’s just a tiny bit doubtful that I’d be considered ‘new’ then, is it!? And of course the others just went with ‘You’re too young for our client’s insurance.’ So… sod it.
I’m not stopping here and I’m not giving up, I worked hard to get where I am and I enjoyed it, but any newbies reading this beware, it is a long, difficult road to getting a driving job when you’re below 25 years with no experience. For every story you read about someone walking into a job in a few weeks, there’s a couple more guys out there who passed last year and just haven’t had the good fortune or circumstances to get themselves on the ladder. Yet.
As for me, I’ve finally got enough pennies back together for my Cat C+E and done a few assessments with local training companies (Takes a while to get use to that trailer!), sadly they’re all booked up until the end of sodding July, and until they can book more tests, I can’t actually book a course! But I’ve waited this long! Guess I’ll just have to wait a little longer.
