The state of toilets available to the itinerant lorry driver leaves little to the imagination. I pride myself on being fairly robust. My nostrils can cope with most things and my stomach rarely turns. Ideal traits for any budding lorry driver (see ‘pissing in the wind’).
Unfortunately, my memory also likes to conjure mental images of things seen with my eyes and will occasionally conduct a slideshow of things I’d rather forget while at the same time conveniently overlooking why I ventured into the kitchen with an alarm clock. Flashbacks are often triggered by a specific event. For example, if I venture into any ‘every little helps’ supermarket a cerebral slideshow of a toilet at a regional distribution centre (RDC) who house goods for the ‘blue stripe’ retailer vividly reappears. That ‘incident’ happened more than five years ago, and yet I cannot shake it. Having got through the security gate where even having the right paperwork is no guarantee of entry, then parked up on the correct bay and strolled via the marked out footpath to the ‘driver’s hub’ to hand in the paperwork and keys, I was left with a choice of plastic chairs, an ‘out of order’ vending machine and Sky News on mute. After a few moments watching Kay Burley’s lips move in silence my intestines twitched slightly, and my attention turned to the wooden (I say wooden, its MDF really with a lacquered wood-effect veneer but let’s not quibble) door in the corner marked ‘toilets’. My erstwhile colleague Big Dave, who I meet occasionally at weekends, is (currently) married to a former nurse. She likes to tell stories of how many nurses suffered from problems linked to urine retention. She blamed understaffing. Unable to take a break during a shift, let alone go for a slash, it meant nurses would ‘hold it in’ for hours on end. As lorry drivers it’s something we know well, especially if we’re pushed for time. Holding onto wee leads to infections, she explained, and overstretching the ‘external sphincter muscles’ (her words not mine) that hold back the golden shower will eventually mean losing control of the bladder. Her stories usually include a graphic description of weak bladders in action; ‘the gates opened’, ‘flooded two wards’ and/or ‘up to our ankles in shandy’. Likewise, resisting the urge to deliver a load can lead to problems with the bowel. Holding on to waste products for extended periods also leads to infection, constipation and inflammation. Just ask the most famous lorry driver of them all, Elvis Presley. Big Dave’s wife doesn’t see it as an indignity but merely a way of the body telling you things aren’t working properly. Anyway, it’s clear to me I need the toilet. Armed with intestinal fortitude I opened the door to discover…another door. Behind that door was hell. At this point I considered going into the detail, however, I cannot do it justice. Perhaps an analogy serves better. Imagine, if you will a pile of shit and you standing knee deep in it. Yes, that about sums it up. My eyes quickly watered to reduce the stinging, I stopped breathing once the smell hit my nostrils and my legs began to cramp up. I went numb. It was like an anaesthetic. I backed out before I passed out and almost fell backwards into the waiting room, then I headed out for what passed as fresh air and I was actually reprimanded by the ‘goods in’ clerk for going outside. It took me several minutes to come back to my senses. I imagine this is how people recover from major surgery. Someone in a suit appeared, as if by magic, as I lean against the wall. I half expected him to show me another door that led to a changing room. He asked me what I am doing. “Holding the building up, pal,” I offered up as I caught my breath. “You cannot be out here,” he replied with a hint of aggression. “It’s a working yard, it’s against the health and safety rules for the site.” I am not in a position to argue, partly because I need to get the pallets off the trailer and the paperwork signed off, so I can get across town and reload. The boss wouldn’t be happy if I was thrown off site before that happened. However, I make the shopkeeper wait until I am good and ready to go back in. My experience is one shared by lorry drivers via hundreds of social media posts. Toilet facilities afforded to lorry drivers are disgraceful. Each one reminds me of that hellhole I encountered, and the story is the same every time; the lorry driver is ignored, their needs are overlooked, and no respect is given. Things need to change. My suggestion is simple; lorry drivers are visitors to a site. Like all visitors, whether they be an executive or the chauffeur, they need to be treated with respect and given access to basic amenities. You should not have to battle with warehouse staff or security over ablutions. But as George Orwell illustrated in Animal Farm; “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
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HAULAGE HEADLINES Making sense of senseless sense
LEAD STORY POLICE HUNT MICHELIN MAN THE Metropolitan Police is on the hunt for former marketing icon that is Michelin Man. Police say the pallid ribbed rubber tyre man has not been seen recently and they are concerned as to his whereabouts. Police have warned the public not to approach the 125-year-old who official debuted as a mascot of the Michelin tyre company in 1894 at the Lyon Exhibition. . Instead of placing all the emphasis on the lorry driver and operator to enhance safety, the DfT and Mayor of London must make changes the road network to improve cycle safety. Cycling and lorries. Everyone has an opinion. No one is right. everyone is right. Only Brexit is more divisive.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has put the onus on to haulage operators to meet the new direct vision standard (DVS). That’s another debate for another day but clearly a level of direct vision for the driver to the cyclist would improve matters. Construction vehicles appear to be the focus with a high seating position making blind spots significantly larger. Justification for DVS is damning statistics that show trucks were involved in 22.5% of pedestrian fatalities and 58% of cyclist fatalities on London’s roads in 2014 and 2015, despite only making 4% of total road miles driven. While low entry cabs and transparent passenger’s doors are steps in the right direction, in truth the Mayor of London can and should do a lot more. Two areas to focus on is separating cyclists from traffic and adding traffic lights specifically for cyclists. In cities across the European Union cyclists are separated from traffic at every conceivable opportunity. In France, roundabouts have a cycle lane going around the outside to separate bikes for motorised vehicles. This small degree of separation means motorists know where cyclists should be, and cyclists can tackle roundabouts with full vision of adjacent traffic even if they are making for the third exit. In Holland cyclists get their own traffic lights that work in turn with motorised traffic. In really congested areas cyclists get their own lane complete with a traffic light system that allows cyclists to criss-cross roads and roundabouts in turn with vehicles. And its traffic lights that present a real problem, especially if it’s a section of road with several sets of lights. It’s commonplace for an intersection with traffic lights to have the green painted bike zone down the nearside and in front of the stationary traffic. In good old Blighty, and especially in London, I have no doubt that road planners believe a visible zone at lights ahead of the vehicles at traffic lights work. First, when on red, cyclists swarm and congregate the vehicles. When the lights go green cyclists set off at different speeds forcing vehicles to either go around or set off slowly waiting for the cyclists to sort themselves out. An accelerating truck might pass all the cyclists before coming to a halt 500m down the road at the next set of lights. And so, the mobile Tetris begins again. The danger is repeated again and again. At lights more, lorry drivers are protecting themselves by stopping closer to the curb and forcing cyclists to go around the outside to pass. Cyclists are forced to go around a stationary object and into view of the driver, sit tight behind the vehicle in question, or mount the curb and plonk themselves back onto the road in front accompanied by some sign of annoyance. Driving through any city is tough; traffic lights, roundabouts, one-way systems, limited parking, fast-moving traffic, pedestrians, cyclists. There is a lot for the driver to take in. Forcing low entry cabs onto operators will help but this measure needs strengthening with commitment from the Mayor, TfL and GLA to contribute. Separating cyclists from traffic is a priority, and traffic lights for cyclists are a must – changing road infrastructure will cost money but unless his does something all the Mayor of London has done is delegate responsibility and transfer liability with the least amount of effort. Lorry drivers suffer from déjà vu more than most people, whether it be the same road, the same conversation or the same food yet the one that grates the most is being held up at a delivery site. Unlike many deliveries to warehouses, this one requires me to unload the trailer. After lining up 26 pallets of a popular household product into two neat rows I help ‘Liam’, a young warehouse operative with greasy hair and fresh acne, check the contents. Considering the load consists of 2,912 identical items this shouldn’t take long...
Liam inspects the delivery note. It has one line on it, hardly War and Peace. Liam awkwardly brushes aside his fringe then draws a handheld device from his hip with a speed that won’t have troubled Clint Eastwood. Liam sets off along the first line of pallets scanning barcodes. Liam suddenly stops midway to chat to a co-worker, both then wander off somewhere. When Liam returns sometime later Liam starts scanning the first pallet again. “Everything OK,” I ask. Liam abandons the scanning and over the next few minutes I discover that Liam wouldn’t invite fellow employees to join him in the pub, and if his management team ran a pub everyone would all be sober. The equipment – like his handheld scanner – rarely works, the company is understaffed and underpaid, and everyone who started when he did have already left. I’d have settled for a ‘no’. “When did you start?” I ask. “Two months ago,” Liam replies. After a pause I offer my own recent involvement with his employer: “I’ve only been here for seven hours.” This delay is the latest of several in the past couple of weeks, I want to tell Liam that I’d been holed up in a windowless room in Hatfield for three hours, ignored in a waiting room in Derby for two hours, told to come back later (no actual time given) by security at an RDC in Bristol, and sat in my cab for two hours and 43 minutes in Glasgow before being told to back onto a loading bay and then to wait for another two. I want to scream at Liam that I wasted a 15-hour spread over and didn’t even get to register a split rest. In each case I kept my end of the bargain and arrived on time. Yet it seems indicative that the driver’s time is treated with the least importance even though within the intricate chain that binds the movement of goods it is only the much-maligned driver who is restricted by time and motion, as defined by law. Alright, I’ve ignored Working Time Directive, which is another anguish altogether. In waiting rooms across the UK truck drivers take a break from watching porn on their phones to buy crisps and coffee from vending machines, some are lucky enough to use flushed toilets and ignore the continuous loop of a muted Sky News predicting doom on flat screen TVs. Most drivers get this once a day, sometimes twice. The amount of time lost to delays reduces driving time but increases each shift. How many times have you lost a precious 15-hour day, while not even getting close to nine hours driving let alone 10? Drivers are human beings; they’re not impervious to the crippling frustration caused by poorly run RDCs unable to keep its own schedule, only to have salt scrubbed into the wound by indifferent staff. Perhaps the best way around it is to see it for what it really is; a colossal joke. Some executive somewhere in an air-conditioned office overlooking an expanse of concrete is chuckling away at the pain caused to unseen victims. At one site a bored driver loudly threatened a dirty protest if the goods in desk didn’t buck up its ideas only to have another driver point out it would be difficult to make the toilets at this RDC any worse. Instead he threatens to clean the toilet, ‘have it sparkling so you could your dinner off it’, sort out the plumbing, provide soap and toilet roll, enter it in Britain’s Got Talent as an actual working toilet in an RDC and then piss all over the floor. The recipient of the trucker’s indignation merely shrugged, before shouting: “BAY 34”. A trucker bounded across the waiting room, collected the truck keys and signed paperwork then left in a hurry. The rest bite created by a potentially clean toilet dissipated, drivers got back to their phones and Googled ‘MILF’. Mention prolonged waiting times to a driver and most shrug declaring that they don’t care as they’re paid by the hour. Unless it’s Friday, then they have an opinion... Liam didn’t seem the sympathetic type, so l left him to battle on with his scanner. He swore a few times and disappeared again before reappearing with another one and starting again. When it comes to health and fitness the focus has been on trampers staying in shape but a stint on days left one lorry driver gasping for breath while reaching for the remote. Ally had had enough. The fridge looked like it had been ransacked by rats, the sink was piled high and the rubbish bin would have looked more at home outside a kebab shop than three-bed semi.
She decided to take matters into her own hands. A working mum with three kids, two were her own while the other she was married to, she swept through the kitchen like a whirlwind. Out went the remains of the takeaways, out went the packets of processed foods and snacks, and out she went to the shops to restock. All the while she muttered under her breath; ‘be careful what you wish for’. Four months previous, Ally had been taken ill. Nothing serious but the two weeks off work shook her. With two inept teenagers glued to their phones, she realised that she needed support; someone to help around in the evenings, cook, clean, do the bins, taxi the kids to and fro. Hard as it was to admit, this hard-edged, no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is, self-motivated beacon of maturity, needed her husband. Baz got the call to arms and went to the office to sort out going from tramping to days. Line managers considered his demand and discovered a driver wanted to go back to tramping. Within a week Baz was on 5-to-9s. Now, I don’t want to give you the impression that Baz resembled a triathlete but he could put anyone to shame dodging a salad. He enjoyed a varied diet consisting mainly of the beige food groups and associated fizzy liquids. For a week away, Ally packed fruit (five bananas, five oranges and five apples) as well as microwavable meals that were tomato-based with some token veg to go with the processed meat and pasta. If parked up somewhere obscure he’d tuck into his bag of goodies, if at a truckstop he’d use any food token offered to supplement his meal. He was round but with a little effort he could just about see his feet. Contrary to belief, tramping does involve activity. Handball, trailer swaps, sweeping out the trailer, running repairs, tidying the cab, walking to the toilets and café, and then walking back to the truck. You know the story; sedentary with concessions. Days proved to be a different kettle of fish. Baz found himself up at 4am, down the stairs to the kitchen for a brew while stuffing some bread into a sandwich box. A 35-minute drive to the yard for a 5.15am start in a preloaded truck with three-to-five palleted drops and no backload. As a job-to-finish he’d return, park up the wagon, clock out, stroll back to the car and drive home. With Ally back at work, he’d swing by a ‘food retail outlet’ for his tea, which he’d take home and eat in front of the telly. Then around early evening he’d shower and take to his bed. If he mustered 500 steps during the day, he’d be lucky. On days he worked more hours, he travelled fewer miles, walked even less than he did before, he was earning less because his night out money had gone and he was spending more because his meals from the ‘fast food factory’ were not subsidised. Gradually his appearance altered, his clothes grew tighter, and his pace slowed. Ally would return home from her 8-to-5 to discover an array of chip trays, burger wrappers, pizza boxes and large empty bottles littering the kitchen, dining room and front room, not to mention the plates in the sink. At some insistence, Baz would be forced to press pause on Sky+ and attempt to tidy up before words were exchanged. Then, one day, she snapped. The catalyst was a bank statement. Baz was spending upwards of £15 a day on food to top up his token bread roll. A blazing row ensued. Baz arrived at work the following day chastened. He now had a daily budget of £5, which he carried in cash, and a sandwich box filled with green and red things. It took several months of discipline but eventually he was able to see his feet again without the aid of a mirror. Baz and Ally sat down one evening and worked out what would be best moving forward. ‘Divorce was mentioned,’ Baz told me one evening parked up on the A1(M). ‘Divorce or back on the road.’ It took several weeks but management eventually let Baz loose with a sleeper cab again. Peace has been restored. |
AuthorAging proletariat with face, teeth and body to prove it. Archives
August 2021
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