that was another week that was

That was the Week That was

Another week flies by from I don’t like Mondays to Thank God its Friday. BUT…..I won’t do anything this weekend apart from go down the pub and watch Spurs play Man Utd on Saturday 5:30pm on ESPN. I’ll totter around the garden, play a few computer games, clean the car, recharge my batteries then it will be Monday morning 05:45 alarmingly again!!

Harry Redknapp is Manager of the Month, Jermain Defoe is Player of the Month, so that has put a death wish on Spurs beating a team I hate with avengeance, who always seem to have the referee in a red shirt too.

“Come on you Spuuuurrrrrrrrsssssssssss”

This wishing your life away week by week is not good though, blink and you will miss it, well what was that, that was your life mate, oh, cant I have another go, no , game over player one, b,,,,,,,,,s !!

I was thinking today , behind my steering wheel, that some of this slave driving is quite fun in circumstances. I do have mission impossible days, and send an sos which gets zero response. In Peterborough City Centre , delivering all sorts to all persons, come half past five it is game over for me and them. I have hardly any residential addresses, its all shops, stores , schools, offices. But some people you meet in the whirlwind created by Mr Delivery Man , are quite pleasant, and some you can even joke with, like the man having one wheel delivered, and I say, expecting another 3 tomorrow then !! It is good to see their faces, stunned of Peterborough. Then one today “It is 6.15 late for a delivery “ says this Indian corner shop keeper, the sort that are open all hours. “I was expecting this by 12”, it was a standard delivery which means by end of day. “Well 6.15 is late I grant you , especially as I started at 7 this morning” I replied, “as for your expectations, Charles Dickens wrote a book Great Expectations, have you read it.” Shut him up.

I must admit as a Trading Standards Officer, a lot of people hate you apart from the ones you are fighting for in the justice stakes. For instance, Essex women at those singles dances would baulk when I told them my job, as they were from Chav centre, and loved fakes, or Car Dealers would curse me, saying I hope you die from some incurable lingering death, or “there is a terrible smell round here”. To be fair to them I was always professional and doing my job well, and lots of people hate authority. I developed a thick skin, Rhino Hide, not just water off a duck, but I am still human, of flesh and bloods and things. Even as a Smoke Free Officer the smokers and some publicans muttered, here comes the Gestapo. Not so, but it’s all relative isn’t it. I was never a local government pencil neck. Now I deliver to local authority officers who are clearly on a different time dimension to me, and I must seem a blur to them, whereas they are in slow motion to me.

But fellow courier drivers are friendly to me, even the competition, and some clients are too, even getting excited as to what’s in the cardboard box, “nothing “ I have said once or twice, “its just an empty box to get you all excited for nothing ha ha“ There are a few ars……es around like a 4’12” runt in the goods in of a Dept Store I deliver to, who moans about 4pm deliveries. I must admit if I worked with him, he would have ended up like his look alike Robin Fernly at school, a nasty little weasel, and he ended up at the end of my right arm by the scruff of the neck pinned against a brick wall, always worked in getting the message across I found, even if the bloke was a 5’12” irritant. Another game while I work is notching up little taxi emblems on my wings like the Spitfire pilot and his swastikas, and a bigger emblem for buses too. Well a little boy said to his Dad today walking past me, “Daddy that’s a big van”, so the emblems are easy to notch up. Peterborough Council town planners must have a scaletrics set and lego, they have bizarre one way systems and few places to unload. They channel traffic to that it snarls up and pollutes at traffic lights that are phased on warp factor -273. The shopping centre underground service area has more than half its lifts caput at any one time. Really you wonder how the people in so called charge expect the shops to sell things to shoppers.

But there are some normal people about, I spot them too, though they are a rare endangered species. They can make the job pleasant and not so monotonous. EG. the ones that banter “sign above” “My name is not above” derrrrrr, “its Harris”, a hoo hoo hoo, and there are even ones that smile at me (always the female of the species) when I appear slave driven. “Have you brought me a present?” “Well as it’s you…….. err no, but it is special delivery”, “why is it special”, because it’s delivered my me of course!!!”

A quiz I play on the computer reckons a man loses 2.8 litres of water in perspiration a day, well I have no need to phone a friend or ask the audience on that one, not even 50-50, ‘cos it takes me an hour to load the truck each morning and from then on I drink about 4 litres of water, in sunny Peterborough.

I still hate the hand held computer that scans all the incoming and outgoing. User friendly it is not, one sequence one way only it is, mistake you make is irreversible, indestructible it is, technology replaceable it should be. A computer that is not logical, now that’s an invention !!

It seems to me that we are coming out of recession now though. When I started, was it just 7 weeks ago, blimey, it was only the computer games shops and mobile phone shops that had sizeable deliveries, now I need a tin can opener to take the roof off to get everything loaded.

I still wonder how the former Deputy Editor of BBCTV Watchdog can come to this, and from earning £33k in the ‘90s now it is £20k. Especially when on the radio I hear about the fat cats of the Banks and the 4 fat cats that did very nicely thank you out of killing Rover a British Icon, and a make of car I always cherished and owned. I would have made a programme exposing them long ago, but that was then and this is now.

Those were the days my friend we thought they’d never end……………but they did, just like last week came to an end too.