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On the maren
Page 13
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Chief exec ahoy!
Take a stroll with us through the little side roads of haulage, the diversions and detours, the quirky, the quixotic and the downright strange...
Like Joe Pesci's psychotic character Tommy DeVito in mob film Goodfellas we're often tempted to ask "You think I'm funny do ya?" followed by an unhinged, staring-eyed, gunwielding threat-a-thon at anyone that comes within three feet of us. If, that was, we weren't so afraid of the answer to the first question.
With all this in mind we've been brushing up on our comedy skills, putting in endless hours in front of the telly with a constant stream of DVDs featuring top stand-up comedians and a bottle of Buckfast. It seem to have stood us in good stead. Mother-in-law jokes? Check. Laboured, unfunny ethnic minority gags? Check. Near the knuckle Roy 'Chubby' Brown-inspired filth? Check. Excellent. By way of a finish to this rambling introduction: did you hear the one about the chief executive who got stranded up a certain creek without a paddle?
Well, OK it's not strictly true, but we are led to believe that Richard Turner, chief executive at the Freight Transport Association, managed to spend a great deal of his recent sailing holiday tied up in dry dock like a leaky cruise liner. Rumours abound as to the exact reason for his becalmed state: our money was on a Mutiny on the Bounty-style incident, although the exact explanation is being offered as something as prosaic as "hitting some debris".
This evidently forced the boat to take shelter before it and its precious cargo were consigned to the bottom of the waves. Cue one holidaying chief executive permanently moored in Cherbourg until the boat was sufficiently watertight to take him home (although you might think a freight industry professional would know that there are regular ferries back to Blighty).
Elsewhere on the good ship Commercial Motor, we've found this little item floating in our bilge tanks. Now, if you're thinking that a press release on pallets isn't going to be the most exciting thing in the world then, like us, you'd approach the following with all the enthusiasm of someone about to have a barium enema. The first paragraph reads snappily: "This week, LPR UK, the country's leading smart pallet service and owner of the increasingly prevalent red pallet pool, has announced its intention to improve dialogue with commercial drivers to reduce the risks of misappropriation of pallets in the FMCG supply chain and other pallet receipt points."
Translation: LPR wants truck drivers to stop half-inching its pallets. Exciting? No, we didn't think so either.