BIRD'S EYE VIEW
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BY THE HAWK
• Renault has a secret weapon. According to the company's press office it is 1,625mm long, 48kg heavy, blonde and pretty.
Naturally, "it" is a woman. Teresa Fryer is, apparently, "trucking to success in a man's world". She has been appointed a truck sales executive at Renault Trucks London, in Park Royal on the A40.
She has had to graduate to this lofty position, mind you, with eight years commercial vehicle parts selling experience under her belt. Renault does not want her exposed to all you male chauvinist transport pigs without a good grounding in the subject area.
Teresa has found, unfortunately, that our industry deserves this sort of attitude. "The last person a customer expects to turn up when they are looking for a 38-tonne truck is me." Why?
"People do try and catch me out, so I have to be a little bit sharper and know exactly what I am taking about." Why? Her sales patch is north and north west London, Harpenden, St Albans, Potters Bar, Barnet and Enfield. Surely we have some non-sexist truckers out there willing to treat Teresa • Gosport Removals has been ever so busy of late, shifting 5,000 "wheelie bins" a week around the noble streets of Fareham in Hampshire.
A perfect scene for a volley of puns. The company's official line is that it has now been able to put the "lid" on a prestigious contract. Branch manager Ian Lunn says the whole business only goes to prove that Gosport Removals is always at its customers "disposal".
Well . . yes. . . I suppose. Far be it for me, the ever gracious Hawk, to 'rubbish' the efforts of others. In fact, I have never been known to 'refuse' a good free story. Anyway, I think that we had better 'dump' that line of enquiry.
In a rather wonderful aside, Gosport Removals also tells me that the Swedish-made Perstorp bins hold twice the amount of your average British dustbin. Such sensible people, the Swedes. Or are they? The hinged lids have apparently been fitted to "deter rodents". I just love the concept of a clinical Swedish laboratory lost deep in the heart of the pine forests, run by a squeaky clean, serious Scandanavian, patiently waiting for its experimental rats to work out how to lift the lid of the plastic Perstorp "wheelie bin". All they have to do is chew through the bottom of it. II Next time you drive down the M20 spare a thought for the dangers and peril some people go through just for the joy of serving up teas, buns and other truckers' favourites (or better still go off the motorway at junction 7, keep going till you come across a pair of rival snackbars on either side of the road). Ted Hudson, 60, and Julie Morrell, 19, (who's your favourite?) each have their own mobile snack bars and each has suffered at the hands of a mystery attacker. Hudson's converted coach has had its windows broken and he says he was punched. Morrell's trailer cabin has been subjected to similar treatment and she has been threatened with a sword after paint stripper was poured over her car.
Despite the close proximity of the two snack bars neither is really competing with the other as they are divided by a dual carriageway so that rules them out as suspects. This