It Fell Off the Back of a Lorry, Guv

God, what a day. On paper, ever so easy. Deliver five cars to Leicester; return with four; tip and reload with five for another Leicester customer. Return empty – oh, nice steady number. Plenty of time to park up and plan my forthcoming photoshoot up at the North York Moors.

Of course, it was not to be. I reached Leicester quickly and easily in the Iveco and even managed to park, which is something of a rarity in Leicester. It was chucking it down, so I was in for a soaking. Fortunately the area was marked by double-yellow lines, and a quick perusal of the Highway Code shows that these mean ‘Parking for Car Transporters only.’ Thoughtful touch.

This unloading location is extremely tight, and turning the cars around to get them to the dealer is tricky. Forewarned is forearmed, so I’d reversed all the cars onto the lorry to enable me to simply drive them off and into the yard. Why make more work for yourself?

First car off was a VW Passat. Well, I don’t know what happened even now, but it seemed to creep forwards, then suddenly lurch to the nearside and come to a stand. It would not go forwards or backwards. What the hell …? I got out, and saw to my horror that it had managed to jump off the ramps altogether so that both wheels were hanging in the air, and the floorpan of the car was sitting firmly and immovably on the body of the truck. It was like the final scene in The Italian Job, except that Charlie Croker had a brilliant idea at that juncture, whereas I was rather bereft of inspiration.

Still, think logically. All I had to do in essence was jack the car up enough so that I could release the trapped unloading ramps, and jury-rig them to a point where the car could be moved. Well, nothing worked. I keep plenty of bits of wood on the truck for small problems like this, but I couldn’t build anything big enough. I almost had it at one point, and freed up the offside ramp, but the nearside was firmly jammed as that side of the lorry was parked on the pavement (yes, well, it’s a very narrow road). I went to scrounge some construction materials from the car dealer. I was looking for bulky items to put under the wood to create height. He had a couple of old car batteries lying around, so I took one. As it was raining heavily and my mind was on other things, I didn’t notice that all the little caps were missing until I hefted the first battery up, and the contents sloshed all down my shirt and trousers. Consequently, my shirt and trousers began to turn several shades lighter; whilst my mood turned several shades darker. It was not my finest moment.

Another unwelcome issue was that whereas the street had been devoid of people and life when I had arrived, to the point that I wondered if Leicester had been taken over by zombies, (the jury is still out on that one) there was now a sizeable crowd of spectators gathered who clearly had nothing better with their time than watch a car transporter driver make a complete and utter idiot of himself. As I was now the focal point of their day, I was trying to play it cool and act nonchalantly as if this was all part of the job and a case of ‘there is nothing to see. Please go home.’ Of course inside, I was shitting bricks.

After an hour of pussyfooting around and trying the gently-gently approach, I arrived at the conclusion that there was no nice way of doing this job. Time to get brutal. I couldn’t jack the car up from below, ergo; I’d have to lift it up from above. I attached a ratchet strap to each front wheel, and hooked the other end into the rear of the top deck. Then I lifted the deck as if I was loading, and this hauled the car up as well. It’s not clever and it’s not pretty, but as a last resort, it does the trick. The straps run so tightly against the body that the front wings were damaged, and it also took out the passenger side mirror as it took the tension. But with the car lifted clear I was able to manhandle the ramps into position and lower the car onto them, then gingerly drive it off.

I’ve built up a good relationship with this customer, and he was fine about the whole thing. An inspection of the car, a quick test drive around the block followed by a phonecall to base to do a quick negotiation and everyone was happy. No arguments, lawsuits or bad feeling – accidents happen; it was chucking it down with rain and the decks and ramps were slippery. No permanent damage was caused, so job’s a good ‘un. A refreshing change these days.

I loaded the four returns without crashing any of them and chugged back to base. By now I was a couple of hours late, so they’d thoughtfully loaded the Atego with my next delivery. So it was a quick tip, followed by taking my tacho and bag from one truck to the next and setting off back to the city of the zombies. Because I hadn’t loaded the cars myself, I didn’t know until I got there that every single one was flat. Fantastic! It was a case of getting in, getting out, getting the battery pack etc, etc. I need all this. One car would only drive with the battery pack attached to it, an Astra had a broken bonnet clip that could only be released by whacking the bonnet in a certain way at a certain place – I felt like Fonzie in Happy Days hitting the jukebox. Heeey!!!

All in all it was not a brilliant day. And I never did get parked up to plan my day in the North York Moors. Mind you, looking at the forecast for the weekend, I’m not sure now …

They tell me that there's always someone having an even worse day than you are.