WHAT MAKES A HAULIER
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by one who got away
HAULING for a living is a form of lunacy, and a pernicious form at that. I have met literally hundreds of otherwise sane and reasonable men who have been afflicted to greater or lesser degree by the dreadful virus; some have recovered, others have acquired the disease in a chronic form and are beyond help or hope. For the guidance of potential victims or more fortunate observers I append a brief description of the qualities and attributes necessary to survive the infection.
First and foremost — and no man can speak on this point with greater authority than I — the potential haulier must banish utterly all romantic thoughts and inclinations in connection with the work. If you wish to see your name travelling the land in large letters, rent some space on the side of a bus and at least you will know the total cost in advance. There is absolutely nothing romantic about the job, with the possible exception of furniture removal, though all the practitioners of that art I have ever met were down-to-earth men indeed.
Life in the industry is real and earnest with a vengeance, and what makes it different from every other trade is its immediacy. If you do not sell a man a car today you may sell him one tomorrow, but if a man asks you to move 10 tons of peas or of paper he wants it done NOW, and if you do not do it someone else will and tomorrow the load has gone for ever, and so has a day's depreciation — and tax, and insurance, and wages, and bank interest and many other overheads which the load would have paid for.
Nobody loves you . . .
Further, you will find that nobody loves you and every man begrudges you your living: a man who cheerfully pays £15,000 for a yacht will crib like hell at your £.8.5 bill for moving it overland, and whatever beggarly rate you charge is always too much. The Press when not glorifying your drivers (which see later) is normally engaged in castigating the haulage industry as a whole and your branch in particular: at your door is laid responsibility for road accidents, the destruction of ancient buildings, the cost of living, much organized crime, and the fact that many rabbity motorists are late for things because they are unable to pass "these Enormous Great Lorries". The howls of protest which greet each increase of lp on the price of a gallon of petrol drown the groans of the haulier whose penny is consumed every eight miles compared with the 20-40 miles of the hard-done-by motorist. Your problems, as you will often be told, are your worry and the concern of no one else.
Accepting this, you now have to prepare to sink your capital into a mechanically propelled vehicle, or several if it is great enough. Even the most expensive of these is fallible to a great degree and the roads swarm with other vehicles and people intent on damaging and/or destroying your property.
Worse, unless you are a one-man-band you must be prepared to hand over your assets /capital/stock-in-trade to a number of third parties who will not see them in the same light as you do.
While lorries have a similarity one to the other all drivers are individuals, and unless you ride with a man all the time you can have little idea of what he does. Some will lavish care and attention on their steeds and guard your property as zealously as you would, but many others care only for this week's pay packet and regard vehicles with complete unconcern: a few even seem to have a deep-rooted hatred of the machines they drive and ill-treat them grievously. It's a lottery, and you can have no way of knowing when you engage a man into which category he falls. You will find out in due course, and always at your expense.
Possession of the so-called sixth sense is therefore a useful attribute of the aspiring haulier: some men have a "nose" for other men, but this generally is the result of long and costly experience. It is a golden rule that 98 per cent of drivers regard you as fair game, and will regard good-nature as weakness and liberality as their own well-deserved good fortune: neither will they respect you — a further sad shock for a sensitive nature, though if yours is sensitive read no further and just forget the whole thing.
Along with the sixth sense you should combine a keen legal brain, for you will find to your surprise that Parliament has seemingly spent the last 80-odd years determining means to impede your working. Such fascinating volumes as Construction and Use Regulations and the Road Traffic Act (with copious amendments) must be committed to memory and a sharp watch kept for further amendments and new regulations which seem to appear almost daily. Every nut and bolt, every hour and every mile and every hundredweight (or kilogram) has at least one Section governing it, and you ignore the most minor of these at your peril. Not only the Department of the Environment inspectors but alert police forces, customs officers, revenue men and other vigilantes lie in wait for your smallest and least-intentioned transgression, and your own men will make conspirators of you given any chance.
Moreover, if you are to have any chance at all you must have a sure and instinctive grasp of accountancy and costing, being able to decide in a flash if £3.26 per ton from Killiecrankie to Lostwithiel is or is not a profitable rate. (You must of course also know to a mile where these places and all others are located and how many miles separate them.) This faculty accompanies an encyclopaedic knowledge of all goods likely to be hauled (which means all goods) so that the brain can summon up in a flash an accurate (to fin.) mental picture of the size of 10 tons of processed swarf, which as everyone knows occupies a lot less space than the unprocessed variety.
A good working knowledge of machinery is another essential: this does not mean a mere engineering degree nor the ability to dismantle and reassemble a differential gear; such skills may be easily learned and practised. What you must acquire and keep in functional shape is the ability to diagnose with complete accuracy a possible fault purely from a driver's telephoned description of a "clonking noise". This must be unerring, as it is your sole responsibility to decide whether or not the vehicle can be driven on without dreadful consequences.
Freudian cloilks All these requirements are as nothing compared with the psychological needs of the job. No professor of the alleged science would stand a chance in conflict with the most ordinary of lorry drivers, yet your reactions must be instinctive and unfailingly correct to the myriad ploys and stratagems with which the ceaseless struggle is waged. Clonking noises, you must know without conscious thought, are frequently of greater or lesser severity depending on the imminence of dart matches, football matches, etc, and the proximity of the vehicle to possible lady friends of the driver, and all other foibles of human nature must be an open book to you.
If this were not enough let me inform you that you have yet to consider your real adversaries: these are the people on whom you rely for a living, your customers. In most trades it is possible to establish, albeit with great effort, an at least half-way friendly relationship with a customer, but this is rare indeed in transport. Your part in the great cycle of trade and commerce is labelled by manufacturers "nonproductive": you represent an on-cost, an embarrassment to the clever chemists and engineers who have so brilliantly kept down the price of their product.
They will demand from you the utmost in service as a standard and from time to time the impossible as a right. I fear you will have to be prepared to perform this, and so weighted are the scales against you that you will receive no thanks or appreciation for your achievement. Worse, should an earthquake engulf your lorry or a tidal wave overwhelm it, all your herioc efforts will count for naught, and your years of faithful self-sacrifice be forgotten at once and for ever.
Watch those keen types Should you by dint of super-human effort and the best of good fortune actually establish the dreamed-of rapport with a customer, rest assured that he will either be stricken down by some foul disease or supplanted by some keen young man anxious to prove his worth by the reduction of "non-productive" costs. The same young man . will really savour the moment of informing you of this, but will nonetheless hold you in abeyance pending the time when his new haulier lets him down.
He will then graciously permit you to perform the traffic pattern so laboriously built up over the years but as a great favour and at a lower rate explaining "that's what we pay, you see". Even more galling will be the offering to you of your old traffic by your supplanter on a sub-contract basis.
All this must leave you unmoved, so be sure to have a really thorough medical inspection, with particular reference to blood pressure, before venturing into this sphere of activity. Supermen are below average in this world: I have met many aspirants who declared in the manner of one proclaiming something special that they were prepared to work night and day. These unfortunates have always been surprised to have this claim received without emotion, as night and day represent only the basic working hours of a haulier, and considerable overtime is not only available but essential. No man incapable of sustaining at least 36 hours per day has the least chance of survival.
Nor should such personal matters as have been mentioned serve to blind the neophyte to his participation in the national and even international scheme of things. There is an ancient saying beloved of so-called politicians and other dictators, concerning "the means of production and distribution", and this latter has much to do with you. You may fondly imagine that because you live in Cornwall the thick head suffered by one Hamish Mac Pype of Muckinch one morning can exert little influence on you: you are wrong, and will pay dearly for your error.
You will never meet Hamish, who is the district convenor (or some such rubbish) of the Unofficial Dock Stewards' Action Committee which currently holds the actual power in the port area. The names of such outfits change from time to time, but their direction is generally Communist and their motivation destructive. The thick head earlier referred to will one morning render him even•less reasonable than usual, and as a sizeable chunk of your capital approaches the docks with a valuable export load he will lead his sheep through the dock gates (though not before the television cameras are correctly positioned) and declare that be and his "brothers" are being yet again exploited by capitalist /reactionary / nee-Fascist / crypto-Imperialist /revisionist lackeys/jackals/hyenas and vested interests.
Guess whose fault...
After three days' frantic effort you will have the lorry and load diverted to Liverpool, having wired monies and advice . to your starving driver. He will arrive at Liverpool one hour after the workers there have recognized the justice of the cause for which their Scottish brethren are sacrificing so much and have performed their own so-called march. A week later you will return the load to its point of origin, but any attempt to claim a contribution toward your ruinous expenses will be met by a reference to a clause in everybody's insurance arrangements which specifically excludes the effects of "strikes, lock-outs, civil commotions, etc," and the ball lands back with a dull thud in your court.
Your driver will also leave as his prolonged absence has resulted in the flight of the lady with whom he has been cohabiting with another driver and this will also be held to be your fault.
Such men as Mr MacPype abound in industry today, and while they bear you no personal malice (how could they?) you represent to them a part of Them (as distinct from Us) and by your willingness to work hard for a living and to produce a day's work for a day's pay place yourself entirely outside their comprehension. You are therefore suspect, and Brother, anything suspect must be Put Down — and vigorously.
Should you venture into the international sphere, you will find a huge armoury of chauvinistic ill will and ingenuity deployed against you. Our own bureaucratic machine is childlike in its simplicity when measured against such fiercely defensive organizations as the Italian Civil Service, and they have the added advantage of being able to thwart and harass you in a foreign tongue. Regulations sprout like magic in Europe, and a load which leaves our shores in complete compliance with the laws of all nations may well find itself anathema by the time it arrives at a foreign frontier: it may even be that its rejection in distant countries renders it unfit to re-enter its own homeland, and you can find yourself the owner (as I have) of 10 tons of condemned and outcast pigeons.
Should all this not be enough to daunt you, bear in mind that road transport is now by tradition the politician's plaything. It may be that nobody can be bothered at present to nationalize the whole issue, but should a Minister prove hopelessly incompetent at anything important the day may come when he is awarded the DoE as a consolation prize.
You're the guinea-pig ...
Yet another potential enemy is he who designs and builds your work-horses. When you and others have by long, hard and expensive use removed the "bugs" from a particular model of lorry he will scrap it and introduce a "new" one, bristling with what he will call technical improvements. These are in reality the concrete expression of his "development" department's latest theories and you are the guinea-pig. If they work, they will be incorporated in the production model, though at extra cost; if they do not, he will generally — though not always — abandon them, without acknowledging your research work.
Last but positively not least let me warn you against the most insidious foe of all, an ever-present enemy from whom it is almost impossible to defend yourself. He goes by many names; the mildest of these is self-doubt, and the blackest is despair. No man who cannot stand firm in the face of all the above-mentioned in league with each other should venture into the arena, for this strongest of your assailants is more to be feared than the combination of all the others. His greatest ally is one who defeats and destroys more hauliers than any other single influence, and they generally refer to him as Bad Luck.
Bad luck, old man ...
It is easy to scoff, and to say as some do that Bad Luck is an idle man's definition of his own weakness. Why does your lorry hit the patch of black ice on the bend which did not exist there two minutes before when the other lorry passed over it? Why did the tyre burst then and not four minutes later when the lorry had stopped? Why did the price of the new lorry rise three days before you received delivery of it? Why did the crane-driver's thumb miss the "stop" button when your lorry was underneath? Why did your customer go bust owing you hundreds that you cannot afford? Why was your driver in breach of the terms of your insurance when he had the accident?
None of these could have been foreseen or influenced by you, and human nature being what it is you will be prone to wallow in self-pity and feel that (as I have been trying to tell you) the whole world and life itself is agin' you. At this point the evil Doubt assails you: what's the use? Why should you continue the unequal struggle? Who cares if you live or die? What are you chasing? How long can you last? The short answer is that you said you could do it at the Interview, and you will either overcome this adversary or .succumb to him in his guise of Despair.
If at this point you survive and go forward to conquer, then you. need fear nothing along life's way, for you will never again be so alone. If you do not, then you will not be alone, for many have so perished and there is a queue forming at this and every moment of others who will do likewise.
Either way, don't say I didn't warn you.