Well, bust actually.
Ever thought that things are going too well, and all of a sudden you’re going to come to a grinding jarring halt? Yes, me too. This week my regular lorry, the Iveco Cargo, has been away for a service and MOT so I’ve had the pleasure of driving our spare truck, the much newer and more pleasant spare vehicle that is our recently purchased Mercedes Benz Atego.
Lovely truck to drive, but the bodywork rather lets it down.
This was one of the Atego's first outings, a day return to Liverpool.
With the huge downturn in car sales this year, car transporters have dropped drastically in price, so when this truck appeared for sale it was too good an opportunity to miss. I’d hoped to be given the lorry as my full time vehicle, given that it is newer, lower mileage, more powerful and a lot more pleasant to drive than the old bag of spanners. But, no. The accountants, who always know best, decreed that the Merc should be the spare lorry, sitting around doing nothing most of the time, whilst the Iveco would lurch on in full time use - since when it has broken down twice and needed a new engine and gearbox at a cost that only Fred Goodwin wouldn’t flinch at. Yes, say the accountants, but on paper, it’s cheaper to break down and require a very expensive recovery operation than it would be to use the more modern lorry that can make it as far as Scunthorpe all by itself. I don’t quite get it, but then again, that’s why I drive them and don’t do the accounts.
So I was delighted to send the Iveco off for servicing last Friday, and get my hands on the Atego this week. I picked it up on Monday, glistening in its fresh coat of paint as it had just been resprayed into company colours.
What a difference a fresh coat of paint makes! Now it looks great,
and is just waiting for the new company vinyls to be applied.
The week flew by until Friday morning, when I had to collect the Iveco, load up and do a delivery in Peterborough. Long before reaching my destination, I knew I had problems. The air pressure was falling, and I lost all my low-end gears as a result. Pulling away from a roundabout or junction was similar to pulling away in a car in fourth gear – judder, judder, judder, lurch, judder, stagger, over-rev and finally crawl away. Having thus endeared myself to the road users of Cambridgeshire, I crawled and lurched into my destination, which was Lincoln Road in Peterborough. I stopped the truck, pulled on the parking brake, and that was that. I could clearly hear the escaping air; it was shooting out with some force. The fault was a two-inch split in the reinforced pipe – not what you want on a Friday.
Worse followed – I couldn’t raise or lower the decks without air, so the cars on the top deck were stranded. The usual phone calls to base and our service provider were exchanged, with helpful comments like, ‘Drive it up to Lincoln and I’ll take a look at it.’ I won’t put my actual reply in writing here, as I’m fairly confident that you can guess. After an hour of various phone calls and helpful advice, our service provider agreed to get someone to take a look. This would take time, so in the meantime, the problem was how to get the cars off. The first thing I tried was the traditional bodge. Some cloth wrapped round the split and tied with a couple of cable-ties should suffice – no. The pressure just blew it off. A ratchet strap might work as they are very strong, but there wasn’t room to work. A more ingenious method of unloading was required.
The Atego was also working today, and, quite by chance, was engaged in a delivery on the other side of Peterborough. Another phonecall summoned it to assist – on arrival the Atego reversed down Lincoln Road until the two trucks were back to back. The decks were jiggled about a bit, and the three cars driven across from one lorry to the other. This took 45 minutes, as the Rover was flat as usual – they hold their battery charge for about, oh, anything up to 6 minutes after you take the key out. The Clio suffered from all the usual Renault problems – they are bags of shit. Sorry, but no other word conveys the low esteem that I hold these ‘vehicles’ in. Other car manufacturers get their electronics systems from IBM and Phillips. Renault just take apart singing Santas and bung the wiring into their cars with a Gallic shrug.
“What iz ze problem, heh? If it is right-hand-drive, zen zees car is for ze English, oui? So, we send them le merde, porquoi pas?’
The battery was flat, the bonnet clip was missing so I had to go fishing around to release it, and even when jump-started the immobiliser refused to turn off. But with persistence, patience and lot of swearing, we finally transferred it across. The Ford Focus started on the key and drove across first time – well done Ford! One out of three ain’t bad, I suppose. This was all happening on the road, of course, and I only wish our resident Health & Safety Gauleiter had been observing, as she would be cuddling the litter of kittens she’d just given birth to by now.
Once transferred, the cars were then dropped off from the Atego to our bemused customer. Still no sign of any assistance, so I did the run down to the chipshop to get lunch in. I always try to break down near a café or chippy; it makes the waiting so much more pleasant.
It was two hours before recovery turned up, and he arrived in a small pick up used to collect cars. He had no equipment to fix the truck; his task was merely to assess the job in hand. Well, I’d already assessed it, and summed up my appraisal with a single word. And he’d driven from Huntingdon to tell us that? To be fair, he did attempt a get-you-home fix using some spare rubber tube he happened to have, but just as with my earlier attempts to wrap stuff around the pipe, the pressure just blew it off. So he called back to his base, and requested the service engineer, who should have come in the first place.
This entailed another hour of standing around, during which time a woman from the Council turned up. Oh goody! There is a particularly nosy old bat of a woman who runs an employment agency that exploits foreign workers close to the garage where we deliver. The garage owners and her enjoy particularly bad relations, and everytime we deliver, she phones up our office to complain. She fancies herself as an amateur Health & Safety Gauleiter, but hasn’t got the brains to actually become one, (although to be fair, she has the total lack of personality and commonsense that the job entails) so she does this instead. Now if I were running an employment agency in the middle of a recession, I’d have bigger problems to worry about than delivery lorries. But there you go. Well, today was her red-letter day. Not just one car transporter to annoy her, but two, plus a recovery truck, all blocking one side of the road! She must have had a multiple orgasm, but we couldn’t hear it above the Iveco’s engine that wouldn’t turn off.
The bat has called the Police onto us before, and they’ve duly turned up, and asked me what I’m doing. I’ve told them, and they’ve said fine, carry on sir. So that option was out. But the Council – well, Councils are the natural habitat of the small-minded nitpickers in society; people with absolutely nothing to do all day but find fault with other people who are just going about their lives. Try putting an envelope into your black wheelie bin and putting it on the street at 06:59 and you’ll see what I mean. We may not be breaking any laws by being stuck on the road, but you can guarantee some small minded Council pillock will find some infringement or other. So, along came a woman dressed in her black power suit, driving her black Chrysler (oh, that’s a sign of upward mobility!) Out of the car came a red clipboard and a camera. She wandered up and down the opposite pavement taking photos and ostentatiously taking notes on her red council issue clipboard. What she didn’t do, being a narrow-minded Council busybody, was come and ask us what we were doing there (yes, it was obvious we’d broken down, but you can’t put ‘obvious’ and ‘Council worker’ into the same sentence). This went on for ten minutes, so I made sure my hair looked nice for the photos. With a bit of luck she’ll post them to her blog, as I didn’t take any pictures myself and it would be handy to have a few.
At around 3pm, the actual service engineer finally arrived, some four hours into the saga. He confirmed what the problem was (you don’t say) and removed the offending pipe (yes, he had tools!) and despatched the recovery man ‘down the road’ to a hydraulic specialist to get a new one. This would take time, but what the hell, I’m on wages anyway – and it would be a permanent fix, not a get you home bodge, which suited me fine. So we had a coffee and generally put the world to rights, as you do. About an hour and a half later, the recovery man turned up again, with a biggish pipe – or he was delighted to see me. No, it was a big pipe. This was duly fitted amidst much cursing coming from the bowels of the lorry – these bits are never in convenient locations. Finally, at 5pm, we were done, dusted, and all ready to hit the manic Friday night A1 for the trip back to Newark. I was delighted to be finally leaving Lincoln Road, although presumably not half as happy as the woman at the agency!
Ever thought that things are going too well, and all of a sudden you’re going to come to a grinding jarring halt? Yes, me too. This week my regular lorry, the Iveco Cargo, has been away for a service and MOT so I’ve had the pleasure of driving our spare truck, the much newer and more pleasant spare vehicle that is our recently purchased Mercedes Benz Atego.
Lovely truck to drive, but the bodywork rather lets it down. This was one of the Atego's first outings, a day return to Liverpool.
With the huge downturn in car sales this year, car transporters have dropped drastically in price, so when this truck appeared for sale it was too good an opportunity to miss. I’d hoped to be given the lorry as my full time vehicle, given that it is newer, lower mileage, more powerful and a lot more pleasant to drive than the old bag of spanners. But, no. The accountants, who always know best, decreed that the Merc should be the spare lorry, sitting around doing nothing most of the time, whilst the Iveco would lurch on in full time use - since when it has broken down twice and needed a new engine and gearbox at a cost that only Fred Goodwin wouldn’t flinch at. Yes, say the accountants, but on paper, it’s cheaper to break down and require a very expensive recovery operation than it would be to use the more modern lorry that can make it as far as Scunthorpe all by itself. I don’t quite get it, but then again, that’s why I drive them and don’t do the accounts.
So I was delighted to send the Iveco off for servicing last Friday, and get my hands on the Atego this week. I picked it up on Monday, glistening in its fresh coat of paint as it had just been resprayed into company colours.
What a difference a fresh coat of paint makes! Now it looks great, and is just waiting for the new company vinyls to be applied.
The week flew by until Friday morning, when I had to collect the Iveco, load up and do a delivery in Peterborough. Long before reaching my destination, I knew I had problems. The air pressure was falling, and I lost all my low-end gears as a result. Pulling away from a roundabout or junction was similar to pulling away in a car in fourth gear – judder, judder, judder, lurch, judder, stagger, over-rev and finally crawl away. Having thus endeared myself to the road users of Cambridgeshire, I crawled and lurched into my destination, which was Lincoln Road in Peterborough. I stopped the truck, pulled on the parking brake, and that was that. I could clearly hear the escaping air; it was shooting out with some force. The fault was a two-inch split in the reinforced pipe – not what you want on a Friday.
Worse followed – I couldn’t raise or lower the decks without air, so the cars on the top deck were stranded. The usual phone calls to base and our service provider were exchanged, with helpful comments like, ‘Drive it up to Lincoln and I’ll take a look at it.’ I won’t put my actual reply in writing here, as I’m fairly confident that you can guess. After an hour of various phone calls and helpful advice, our service provider agreed to get someone to take a look. This would take time, so in the meantime, the problem was how to get the cars off. The first thing I tried was the traditional bodge. Some cloth wrapped round the split and tied with a couple of cable-ties should suffice – no. The pressure just blew it off. A ratchet strap might work as they are very strong, but there wasn’t room to work. A more ingenious method of unloading was required.
The Atego was also working today, and, quite by chance, was engaged in a delivery on the other side of Peterborough. Another phonecall summoned it to assist – on arrival the Atego reversed down Lincoln Road until the two trucks were back to back. The decks were jiggled about a bit, and the three cars driven across from one lorry to the other. This took 45 minutes, as the Rover was flat as usual – they hold their battery charge for about, oh, anything up to 6 minutes after you take the key out. The Clio suffered from all the usual Renault problems – they are bags of shit. Sorry, but no other word conveys the low esteem that I hold these ‘vehicles’ in. Other car manufacturers get their electronics systems from IBM and Phillips. Renault just take apart singing Santas and bung the wiring into their cars with a Gallic shrug.
“What iz ze problem, heh? If it is right-hand-drive, zen zees car is for ze English, oui? So, we send them le merde, porquoi pas?’The battery was flat, the bonnet clip was missing so I had to go fishing around to release it, and even when jump-started the immobiliser refused to turn off. But with persistence, patience and lot of swearing, we finally transferred it across. The Ford Focus started on the key and drove across first time – well done Ford! One out of three ain’t bad, I suppose. This was all happening on the road, of course, and I only wish our resident Health & Safety Gauleiter had been observing, as she would be cuddling the litter of kittens she’d just given birth to by now.
Once transferred, the cars were then dropped off from the Atego to our bemused customer. Still no sign of any assistance, so I did the run down to the chipshop to get lunch in. I always try to break down near a café or chippy; it makes the waiting so much more pleasant.
It was two hours before recovery turned up, and he arrived in a small pick up used to collect cars. He had no equipment to fix the truck; his task was merely to assess the job in hand. Well, I’d already assessed it, and summed up my appraisal with a single word. And he’d driven from Huntingdon to tell us that? To be fair, he did attempt a get-you-home fix using some spare rubber tube he happened to have, but just as with my earlier attempts to wrap stuff around the pipe, the pressure just blew it off. So he called back to his base, and requested the service engineer, who should have come in the first place.
This entailed another hour of standing around, during which time a woman from the Council turned up. Oh goody! There is a particularly nosy old bat of a woman who runs an employment agency that exploits foreign workers close to the garage where we deliver. The garage owners and her enjoy particularly bad relations, and everytime we deliver, she phones up our office to complain. She fancies herself as an amateur Health & Safety Gauleiter, but hasn’t got the brains to actually become one, (although to be fair, she has the total lack of personality and commonsense that the job entails) so she does this instead. Now if I were running an employment agency in the middle of a recession, I’d have bigger problems to worry about than delivery lorries. But there you go. Well, today was her red-letter day. Not just one car transporter to annoy her, but two, plus a recovery truck, all blocking one side of the road! She must have had a multiple orgasm, but we couldn’t hear it above the Iveco’s engine that wouldn’t turn off.
The bat has called the Police onto us before, and they’ve duly turned up, and asked me what I’m doing. I’ve told them, and they’ve said fine, carry on sir. So that option was out. But the Council – well, Councils are the natural habitat of the small-minded nitpickers in society; people with absolutely nothing to do all day but find fault with other people who are just going about their lives. Try putting an envelope into your black wheelie bin and putting it on the street at 06:59 and you’ll see what I mean. We may not be breaking any laws by being stuck on the road, but you can guarantee some small minded Council pillock will find some infringement or other. So, along came a woman dressed in her black power suit, driving her black Chrysler (oh, that’s a sign of upward mobility!) Out of the car came a red clipboard and a camera. She wandered up and down the opposite pavement taking photos and ostentatiously taking notes on her red council issue clipboard. What she didn’t do, being a narrow-minded Council busybody, was come and ask us what we were doing there (yes, it was obvious we’d broken down, but you can’t put ‘obvious’ and ‘Council worker’ into the same sentence). This went on for ten minutes, so I made sure my hair looked nice for the photos. With a bit of luck she’ll post them to her blog, as I didn’t take any pictures myself and it would be handy to have a few.At around 3pm, the actual service engineer finally arrived, some four hours into the saga. He confirmed what the problem was (you don’t say) and removed the offending pipe (yes, he had tools!) and despatched the recovery man ‘down the road’ to a hydraulic specialist to get a new one. This would take time, but what the hell, I’m on wages anyway – and it would be a permanent fix, not a get you home bodge, which suited me fine. So we had a coffee and generally put the world to rights, as you do. About an hour and a half later, the recovery man turned up again, with a biggish pipe – or he was delighted to see me. No, it was a big pipe. This was duly fitted amidst much cursing coming from the bowels of the lorry – these bits are never in convenient locations. Finally, at 5pm, we were done, dusted, and all ready to hit the manic Friday night A1 for the trip back to Newark. I was delighted to be finally leaving Lincoln Road, although presumably not half as happy as the woman at the agency!
Brilliant! Singing Santa...I heartily endorse your comments about Renaults. The latest ones have a built in health and safety regime which means you can't start without you have farted first and balanced the spheroids on the seat properly. Then only if the postman is hanging to the left that day.
ReplyDeleteMy brother, who works occasionally on Renault trucks, says they are similarly afflicted, although the Marathon, looking like a house in a horror movie, does have it's devotees...those who have never driven a proper truck like an Atego or Actros, presumably.
I, too, am of the opinion that councils are the home of the halt, the lame and the bedwetters...
Great post.
Iain
That is priceless and very funny; so good I wish I'd thought of it first! Glad that you've come across the same sort of council numpty as I have though - they're taking over the country by stealth. No doubt we'll get some phonecalls today ...
ReplyDelete