After leaving the catering firm I wanted to try another driving job closer to home so I nipped into a local frozen foods store in east Manchester to ask if they needed any drivers for their home deliveries. They didn't, but advised me that one of their stores in Tameside was looking for a driver. I had a successful interview at that store so started multi-drop deliveries from the store almost immediately.
The hours were mostly anti-social as they included some evenings, including Saturdays, but it was a new experience for me and after working indoors for most of my life so far it was literally like a breath of fresh air. I was tasked with working alongside 2 well established unhelpful drivers. I was made to feel like a kid who "doesn't know nothing" as they used to say. I decided to get on with it and became essentially self-employed as I had to work virtually everything out for myself.
One day in late May the store manager in Tameside called me into his office as he had a proposition for me. He told me one of their stores in Cheshire only employed one driver and he was off sick so he asked if I would cover for him for a few days. I explained that I had little knowledge of that area (this was still pre- SatNav) but was willing to give it a go.
The following day I drove down to the store in Cheshire. After a lot of waiting around the store manager took me to the back of the store to load up the van for the first batch of deliveries. As he opened the shutters I couldn't believe what stood before me. The van was like something the Beverly Hillbillies would have scoffed at. He left me to it so I opened one of the back doors to the van and started to load up. As the van was filling up I decided to open the second back door. As I did this it fell off and crashed to the ground narrowly missing my foot. Suddenly, the manager rushed out to see what the noise was to be confronted by his van in bits with me looking rather sheepish beside it. He asked me what had happened so I told him the truth which was that the door simply fell off it's hinges when I opened it. He wasn't happy.
He told me to unload it again and he would have to ask to borrow another van from a store in south Manchester. This ending up taking about 2 hours so in the meantime I was told to stack shelves in the store. I felt like an unruly schoolboy in detention. When it arrived, the second van wasn't much better than the first as the clutch was knackered. Also, the deliveries they gave me were much further out than the 10 mile store radius that Tameside employed.
I ended up getting hopelessly lost on several occasions and at one point out in deepest Cheshire I was so disorientated I even ended up ringing a mate, who I knew lived down that way, to see if he could guide me back to civilisation. By early evening I was losing the will to live and just had one last drop somewhere between Disley and Whaley Bridge. This one had the item that every food delivery drivers feared on it...the dreaded eggs! As I finally pulled up to the address I checked inside the egg boxes for damage. Previously, at the Tameside store, I had a 100% record in delivering undamaged eggs. I opened the boxes and ,much to my chagrin, half of them were smashed.
I explained to the customer what had happened. I was already an hour late with the delivery and now her order was in pieces, as were my nerves. My hopes that she would be sympathetic to my plight were dashed when, not only did she refuse the delivery, but she insisted I return before the end of the day with her precious eggs undamaged. It had taken me nearly an hour to find her rural cottage and we were about 15 miles from the store. About halfway back to the store I got stuck in traffic so I switched on my personal mobile. A message had been left from my manager at the Tameside store asking me to leave the van at the Cheshire store and return back to his store the following day. I guess the people of Cheshire weren't impressed with my delivering skills then!
Footnote: I still don't know if the woman in the cottage got her eggs the same day. It seems as though she really had made the fatal error of "putting all her eggs in one basket" (or clumsy driver's van, as the case may be).
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