In the haulage business you can find, well, let’s say ‘challenges’ along the entire chain. Securing the business, collecting, shipping and the delivery work, can all leave you sometimes wondering if you’ve your own personal gremlin on your shoulder. Take delivery work as a classic example. Now in theory, delivering something should be a breeze. You ring up, agree a date and time, turn up, offload – what more is there to it? If only!

The delivery address – one of life’s mysteries

To start with, it’s incredible sometimes how people seem to be blissfully unaware of where they actually are. Someone can be waiting in a location for you to deliver something but seem very hazy about the actual real address of where they’re standing. Even in the great days of SATNAV, it’s still not unknown for drivers to have to drive around a location looking for someone waving a hanky out of a window or some such so they can complete their delivery work. Why is this? Answers on a postcard please!

Size matters

Then, there’s that other great delivery work challenge – the size issue. In spite of all the discussion and explanation beforehand, you can be sure that someone, somewhere, just won’t get the message. The first the driver often knows of this is when they arrive in the locality with their 12m trailer in tow, only to discover that the delivery is to a narrow cobbled medieval street in a town centre! A variation on that can be experienced sometimes when delivering goods and you discover that someone ‘forgot’ to tell you it was a fourth floor location in a building – without a lift!

Flex those muscles

When you’re engaged in delivery work, you have to try and keep fit – just in case. Why? Well, that’s to cope with those situations when you’re trying to deliver, say, a 750k pallet and discover upon arrival a single elderly person saying, “I need a forklift truck”. Couldn’t happen? Don’t be so sure.

Einstein rules – OK

Sometimes, as a delivery driver or agent, you’ll need to be able to handle the concepts associated with the space-time continuum and advanced physics.That’s because you’ll need to think in terms of wormholes to understand how the people at your delivery address can say that you need to deliver it to their “other place just 5 minutes down the road’ which is actually about 45 miles away. Let’s face it, either your vehicle is far too slow or your thinking is just too constrained and inhibited by a limited understanding what exactly ‘a mile’ is!

Perceptions of time

Another thing you may have to get used to in delivery work is the different philosophies that apply to time. Now this is different to those mentioned above that don’t like to get too hung-up on the physics of the real world. In this category, you can experience those who just don’t see time as being important. Your first exposure to this may come when one day you arrive to deliver something at, say 11:30, only to be told that everyone’s already gone to lunch. That’s likely to get you tapping and shaking your watch with a puzzled look but the following request to “hang around as they’ll be back around 2” might be your first exposure to an entirely new way of viewing time and how it should be spent.

Miracles

Then there are those that are keen to help your delivery work business develop by pointing out your inadequacies – well, let’s say more politely, ‘opportunities to develop’. You’ll see this demonstrated when you dutifully call ahead from a service station saying that the motorway is jammed solid and this means that you’ll be late. You receive the response “well, what are YOU going to do about it?” It’s at that stage you’ll realise just how inadequate you are and how much help you need to develop to a position where you are capable of instantly clearing motorway jams.

The compensations

Hopefully, you’ll get the drift that this is, of course, slightly tongue-in-cheek! Although such things do happen, they’re rare and they should be valued for the laughs they’ll generate when you tell the stories a few days, weeks or months later. Delivery work more than has its compensations and many drivers wouldn’t swap their job for any other!

Author Bio: Norman Dulwich is a Correspondent for Haulage Exchange, the leading online trade network for the road transport industry across the UK and Europe. It provides services for haulage companies to buy and sell delivery work , road transport and delivery work in the domestic and international markets.

Category: Automotive
Keywords: delivery work