Another driving fiasco
I was going to call this a disaster, until I realised that disaster implies a lot more than the minor inconvenience I suffered today. You can call your wedding party a disaster if a whole lot of people get into a big fight and it all goes wrong. Your van breaking down and your whole run cut off at the first stop isn’t a disaster.
What happened was that I had to do the Hampshire tool hire run which I was doing just before Christmas. Today I got to my first stop, at Woodham, which is just outside the M25 in west Surrey, and dropped off the couple of bits I had to drop off. Then I put my key in the switch, turned it … and there was a click, and nothing else.
I called the boss, and he told me to leave it locked for a few minutes to see if the immobiliser would reset itself. It didn’t, so I called the RAC (the Royal Automobile Club’s recovery service) who sent one of their orange vans full of car recovery gear. He checked the battery (it was fine), and then tried to “jump start” it, which failed. Not only did it fail, but I saw smoke coming from the front of the van! The starter motor had short-circuited, and caught fire. After spraying foam into the engine, the RAC guy called out the Fire Brigade, who sent a whole water-truck with about four or five men in it (a bit much for a tiny bit of smoke, IMHO), who pronounced it safe. We then got a rescue company to send one of their trucks out to take me, and the van, back to a repair yard near home.
While stuck at Woodham something or other got the three staff into a discussion about illegal immigrants, Muslims, and other things “wrong” with the world. I have to add that the only papers I see at this plant are the Sun (AKA the Scum) and the Daily Star (an even worse quasi-porn rag), apart from my copy of the Guardian (which I only brought in today because I needed somewhere to sit down out of the cold and something to read). The woman remarked that if Labour gets in at the next election then someone must be on drugs, and there was much talk of illegal immigrants producing dodgy paperwork, and of Australia having the right idea (letting in only those with skills they need, not people who will “scrounge” off them). The really amazing thing was that these people probably live in quite affluent areas – no doubt, somewhere in west Surrey. No doubt they knew little of what they were talking about, other than ideas they’d picked up from their gutter newspapers.
Of course, getting stuck by a broken-down van or truck is just a fact of life in this job. I drive a different vehicle more or less every week and very often I’m not happy with the state of them. Sometimes the work just gets you down as well, such as when people forget that strapping up a load is a two-man job, particularly when you have to put the hook at the end of the strap onto the bodywork, rather than on a special hook under the body (if I’ve made sense there). Then again, some work is just hard, and people sometimes resent it so much that they do really stupid things.
I found this out with a truck I had to drive to Birmingham to pick up some gear for an event hire company. I drove west along the Western Avenue, which leads to the M40, the less congested of two London to Birmingham motorways. Not long after I got onto that road, I noticed that the truck was having difficulty picking up speed, and I could not overtake a large truck (which, being a large truck, has a device which limits its speed to 90 km/h, or 56 mph). I wondered if my truck had the same (small trucks do not have to have them, but some do, for insurance reasons). I eventually called the boss and he told me that it didn’t. But still, the speed problem got worse, and about thirty miles down, I could only do about 45 mph, except when going downhill.
I turned off the motorway, and ended up taking the B-road route via Thame and Bicester (pronounced Bister) to the Cherwell Valley service area a few miles north of Bicester. By the time I got there the van was pretty much crawling. I called the boss and told him he’d have to get the recovery people out, which he did. When the recovery guy came, the boss rang and told me that some guy who didn’t like the work he had to do the day before had poured salt into the diesel tank.
The recovery man replaced a filter of some sort, and we headed up the M40 to Banbury. At Banbury we parted ways after signing some paperwork and being convinced that the truck would make it to Birmingham fine. Of course, trouble set in as soon as I got back onto the motorway, and it slowed to below 40 mph on the climbs approaching Birmingham. (But on the final leg, round the Birmingham ring road, it was all downhill, so the clogged-up engine didn’t slow me much. And they gave me a nice powerful truck to get back to London in.)
