switchlogic:
I don’t normally come in this forum not being a newbie but this post was hilarious. He sounds like a lovely chap who deserves a great job. Maybe a ‘how long did it take you to get your first job’ posting would be interesting if it hasn’t been done already. I’ll start, 4 years. I was driving coaches all over Europe in that time but was too young and inexperienced to drive a truck!
Go on then. I’ll play. I have come to truck driving via an inability to sit in an office in front of a computer all day long. I had been a freelance software engineer (known in the profession as EKS, Evil Kontractor Scum) for 15 years. My father used to own a small pre-cast concrete manufacturing company and I grew up working in the yard as a Saturday job and have always retained a strong affinity with industrial engineering, big machines, lorries etc.
In 2006 I took my Cat. C licence and started doing agency work taking any jobs I was offered. I suspect like everyone else, I had to go through the ‘education’ process whereby the agency slings any old crap your way and you are obliged to say, ‘yes sir massa, please may I have another’. During that period I had the odd minor bump and scrape. It took a while for the idea to set, that you must approach truck driving from the view of operating heavy plant, not driving a car, and calculate the risks accordingly. A to B is easy, it’s the squeezing a truck into a yard or a building site at the end, avoiding all the stupidly parked cars and cunningly designed ‘stealth’ street furniture etc, that takes the concentration.
However as your real world skills increase and transport managers find that you are competent and adopt a professional approach to the job, you start to find that you end up working more for a fewer, more select number of clients. Thankfully! I had some really rubbish jobs to start.
My personal most hated, being driving a 7.5 tonner for a well-known furniture store with a less than enlightened outlook upon customer relations. I had a young driver’s mate who was well practiced in the art of fobbing off clients regarding damaged deliverables and getting them to sign for sub-standard goods. After a few days, during a drop when he had actually managed to make this young woman burst into tears by basically lying to her about her rights, I decided enough was enough. I took her to one side and explained her consumer rights and told her to stand her ground. My ‘mate’ disappeared for a minute or two then put me on the phone to the customer services manager. I was ordered to get back into the lorry and under no circumstances was I permitted to speak to any of the clients again. Needless to say, I didn’t work out between us and I have vowed to never do furniture delivery work. Ever.
By that time I’d gotten enough traction with the agency that I could turn down the really crappy jobs. Their other clients were still asking for me.
Did that for a year or so, until I got knocked off my pushbike, cycling to work one morning (by a high court judge, no less). Then went back to doing some ad-hoc IT support work for a while. This year I bit the bullet and took my Cat C+E test in January. I have been driving on the agency, working full time for a single company ever since… on Cat. C.
It would appear that I have to start to try and climb yet another slippery pole to get some Cat. C+E experience. Not much is forthcoming at the moment. One agency asked the date of my test pass, and then just put the phone down on me, click! Charming. Doesn’t really bother me though, something will turn up eventually.