How much crap do you take from your company before throwing your dummy out and leaving? I thought I was being reasonable in defecting my truck because the steering wheel shakes uncontrollably when running empty but “we can’t afford for it to be off the road so you’ll just have to live with it” 
. This is a hire truck by the way. The tyres are all wearing unevenly and it pulls badly to the left when fully loaded. The drive axle feels loose and seems to squirm around as if you’re running on half flat tyres, but can’t see anything visibly wrong and tyres look as you’d expect with 44t on them. Surely the solution to this problem is a call to the hire company: “your truck is broken and needs fixing. The driver will be bringing it in at 2pm with a list of the problems. Please ensure you have a temporary and roadworthy replacement ready for us to use in the interim, thank you.” ?
I put a post up asking about steel plates for the trailer legs to stop them sinking (thanks to all who replied). The company maintenance man/engineer even told them the same, that we needed some 18" square x 0.5" thick plates and they’d do the job. So what did they do? They got some ply and chipboard bonded boards made up, 8 in total, to use 1 set of 2 under each leg. Apart from them being needlessly bulky, these only worked for a couple of days until it rained then they predictably fell apart and became useless. So what did they do next? Finally got the steel plates as originally told? No. “Here are some rubber buffer blocks that we used to have on the loading docks. Those are very solid and will work fine.”
Cue 20 minutes of winding 30 tonne off the ground in low gear and various chocks/blocks balanced on the back of tractor chassis and under the trailer front to use as leverage to help lift the trailer up. All completely avoidable ■■■■■■■ about if they’d just do as they’ve been asked to do and got the steel plates, but no, we’ll make up some wood ones ourselves and save £40, while at the same time they happily let one of the trucks sit idling all night to keep the air up for the valves to work in the trailer for the hour needed during tipping rather than get the air leak fixed. I asked for the steel plates again - surely common sense would now prevail? “I will get the maintenance guy to make up some more wood sets for you. Please take care in future not to get them wet.”
I was telling one of our other drivers about it who has worked there for nearly 10 years. His response “why do you care? Just do your job and go home. So what if there are problems with the truck? You are being paid to drive, nothing else should matter. If it breaks then that’s their problem but you just have to put up with any problems and stop complaining about them.” I just don’t get this mindset at all. If these places fixed the problems when they first arose and were reported then it may only cost them £100 to fix it. When they ignore them and hope they go away it inevitably leads to other secondary things breaking that were reliant on the primary thing to work properly meaning that the bill is now thousands and requires the truck to be off the road for a week or more whilst parts are sourced.
One of the trailers has had the legs bent by one of the other drivers because he couldn’t be bothered to wait until the air builds up to raise the suspension before doing the tug, so they now only wind up about a third of the way, then they jam and you have to do the rest in low gear which takes a good 5 minutes of sweating. I’ve said repeatedly it needs sorting. “We can’t afford to have that off the road as we need it every day of the week, just manage as best you can.” The problem is that the other driver on my days off (the guy mentioned above) just does it without any complaint, so naturally they say “Hussain never has any problems, why is it only you causing problems?”
A new guy has just started because another guy who has only been here 6 months got sick of it and left. I told the new guy how things worked here and was a bit taken aback by his reponse “it’s the same everywhere unless it’s a big logistics company with their own garage, you’ve just got to put up with it. I don’t give a ■■■■. I just come in and do my job and go home. If it drives like a sack of spanners or something breaks on it, ■■■■ it, not my problem, someone else can deal with it.” Seems like he’ll fit right in here.
Have I been out of the loop too long or is this how it is at most companies now? (this is own account/product by the way, not a haulage company). The job itself is good, pays reasonably well and is set, predictable hours, but all this unnecessary and avoidable aggravation because they want to run the transport side on a shoestring doing no preventable maintenance is bringing me very close to walking and telling them to stick their job up their arse. What is it like where you work?
when? being another matter. 
