Delivery Work – Don’t You Just Love It?
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 Nangs Delivery 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