GEARING UP THE DAY JOB
It was December 6th of 2021 that Angus flew the seated two-thirds scale drone with some panache on a serene and sunny winter’s day that made for a great video. As it turned out it would parallel the Wright Brothers epic flight that same month, though principally because there would be practically nobody there to see it beside Angus himself and someone collared in the model-flyers’ clubhouse to wield a smartphone.
The reason I wasn’t there myself was on the one hand because Angus preferred to be left to do his own thing on days like these, but also because I was otherwise engaged myself. By this time was already some months into a modest monthly payment from the UK social welfare system… an oxymoron in itself a dozen years into Conservative rule. Where I lived you were generally guaranteed not to be offered any form of day job, for the simple reason that there wouldn’t be any… like living in Detroit as an auto-worker.
I was though required to list five jobs that I would consider, beside ‘phone-box test-pilot’ or indeed ‘next unicorn’ and aside from gardening I recall having listed driving among the options. Undertaker I had considered, having heard of someone who baked magic mushrooms into the sponge cakes at crematorium in order to guarantee all those attending the send-off of all send-offs. At university, in a similar vein, the only jobs that had ever appealed from off the printed circulars were (a) lighthouse keeper and (b) Hong Kong policeman.
“Great news!” Said my jobs mentor, as I eyed her warily. “It just happens there’s a government-funded HGV course starting in ten days!” she continued, and at a stroke I’d been signed up. This was something of a relief. I’ve never viewed myself as work-shy if only sufficiently motivated, for example by climbing the stairs of a lighthouse to check out the weather each day. At the same time I needed a regular break from building life-sized drones for my own sanity. It was what attracted me to life as an airline captain, in so far as inventing was regularly interrupted by flying and vice-versa. Beside this, I got to see transport museums all over the world by dint of contracts as widespread as Asia, the Middle East or Africa.
Great news indeed, then, in so far as six-week class-room element was to take place at facility a stone-throw from the house. I was too something of a veteran when it came to mature studentship, having been on countless aviation training courses since the get-go. This though would likely be different for the eleven of us present, appearing as an even broader and colourful ensemble. Like any number of aviation courses too, it would be peopled entirely by men. The guy next to me surveyed the enrolment form to be filled in at the outset, and asked me “What does LQBTQ mean?”. It was, I told him, a new European licence covering every class of Heavy Goods Vehicle. We still called them HGVs in the UK, pooh-poohing the EU-speak alternatives. Likewise employers still ask for Class 1 drivers for 44-tonne artics whenever they can avoid the meaningless “C+E”.
In truth, there are many corollaries betwixt driving airliners and driving trucks. My second cousin (second by remove, not literally second by issue) flew for EasyJet and as the airline had been curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, any number of its pilots were driving trucks instead… to the extent that of all the drivers on the books of one agency, a full third were EasyJet pilots. There were driving-time limitations, pre-operating checks, weight and balance calculations, cargo loading processes, accident and incident reporting, hazardous goods, health and safety, crew co-ordination issues and so on; all grist to my pilot mill.
In each case I would use my role-playing skills in class to add relish to the ‘scenarios’ that each us might face on the road or at one or other fulfilment bay: “Hello, which bay do you want me to use?” A colleague would ask, “Do I look like a fucking traffic light?” I would reply. Actually as it turned out on the job, it was the best possible introduction to life as a haulier in the north of England. On one of my first outings I parked my ‘rig’ kerb-side and strolled over to the gatehouse of a chemical works with an affable airline-style “Good morning!”. Without himself looking up, a guy who looked much like the one with the balloons in the movie UP replied “Fuck off”. Similarly in role-plays the ‘banksman’ could not be helpful enough in guiding you whilst reversing a 40-foot trailer into one or other parking place, whereas as often or not on the job you’d be asked “You driven one of these before?” to which I’d reply, “Yeah, for a week now…” and watch them back off.
Though I get ahead of myself. The reason there existed such a course as this was because the government in the UK like every other worldwide had cut everything to the bone and demolished the labour laws; to the extent anyone not flying around in personal rocket-ships was guaranteed a fairly shitty existence. As a consequence there were few people to drive stuff like petrol or PPE equipment around the place as the pandemic set in. As a consequence of this in turn, trainees would be allow to go direct to driving-tests on articulated trucks instead of having to pass one on rigid types instead. This I liked as I figured I’d be able to look down (almost literally) on Class 2 drivers from the get-go in the way that long-haul pilots sneered at short-. Experience would bear this out, as one guy would later tell me as we sipped coffee at a Tesco warehouse at 04:00 a.m. that he would not be going to the Christmas party, only to mix with drivers who’d not given him the time of day whilst driving Class 2s.
There are though any number of reasons why the average age of people driving trucks in the UK is fifty-five. One is the substitution of permanent roles with ‘gig’ jobs through agencies, which are great for twenty-five year old app developers but rather less so for fifty-five year old truckers. A second is the abandonment a general dismantling of labour unions, and nothing quite epitomises the destruction of blue-collar jobs in the USA for instance, than the fact that members of the Teamsters’ union who once ran the country… don’t. Thirdly the withdrawal of self-employment tax status among those for whom it was originally intended ~ by dint of any number of agency contracts ~ meant a larger take for HMRC at their expense. Fourthly the industry still struggles in attracting women to the role, not least because hitching and dropping trailers remains a job for better-endowed grease-monkeys; beside the fact that few of us male or female want to be watched trying to reverse one of these into a parking place. (And I discovered I was not the only tyro to pull into service stations and pull straight out again after surveying the lack of drive-through parking slots.)
Fifthly though (beside the amount of testing and qualification the role attracted, which was approaching that expected of the average airline pilot or engineer) there was the nature of the job. I quite liked it, for having spent hours staring out airliner windows at clouds while designing drones in my head, I could do so while surveying landscapes from another lofty eyrie. But in the age of TikTok videos and the chance to dance like a monkey to the tune of endless likes and sponsorships, who wanted the dislikes at either end of a trucker’s daily fare?
Nonetheless with the theory drawing to a close in February of 2022, there was only the online tests to pursue at the authorised test centre. Bizarrely the most difficult of this would be ‘hazard detection’ and the only way to smash it was to have watched any number of practise videos of what they called ‘developing hazards’. Ironically it was entirely possible to fail this by having spotted these too early in their development and in truth the test was as much about technique as it was about spotting hazards, in the way that playing Poker successfully has a lot more to it than the cards in hand. Playing ‘Call of Duty’ repeatedly on your son’s Playstation was also an ideal form of preparation, as spotting a Soviet tank in a woodland environment soon enough was much like spotting the ethnically-neutral couple about to wheel the child’s buggy from behind a parked car.
All of that done, however, it was off to the practical lessons and this too harked back to those days when we’d drawn the air-stairs down from a dew-soaked Boeing at dawn of day. Except this would be in Ancoats, where I booked into a discount hotel as a precaution in order to be good to go on the first day of training. This might start as early as six o’clock, not least to avoid the traffic on the way out of Manchester itself. For the opening session though we would be starting off in a Class 2 or unarticulated truck of upto eighteen tonnes, for the cognoscenti out there. This felt overwhelming enough, as it must to be sat on say a 747 flight-deck having only seen the outside from within a 737. The reason for this was simple: most manufacturers use an identical cab whether the vehicle is articulated or not, so there were still three or four steps to negotiate by way of ingress. Although these are generally concealed by the door, some trucks have as many as five and these were well worth flaunting by taking that bit longer to close up. All such cabs in Europe, incidentally, are known as ‘over-cabs’ because they do not have that long snout that trucks in the US do. The reason for this is that the overall length of tractor unit and trailer in Europe is more constricting than in North America, to cater for any number of ancient towns here with decidedly narrow streets or overhanging storeys.
It was then decidedly pleasant to be driving around the lower reaches of Pennine hills on a Sunday morning and pulling up at stops where as often as not the instructor would get the steak sandwiches and mugs of coffee in. Perhaps unsurprisingly many of my instructors were ex-Army, one in particular having done tours of both Iraq and of Afghanistan and been involved in fire-fights in which few would survive. I took extra care not to upset these types for fear of say, insufficient sugar in the teas causing a PTSD-fuelled meltdown on the A6 short of Bolton.
The test itself took place in Atherton, a place we’d go for practise prior on an almost daily basis and which must, as one instructor pointed out, have been a shock to all those who’d bought houses along its leafy highways and byways. The one thing you’d have to say about driving trucks is that, as with airliners, once you got used to them you would find yourself going faster and faster if only for the fun of it. And when tired, quite easily forgetting that you were in something that bit longer than a car. Much like in an airliner too, it meant that whatever you might collide with would come off rather worse if indeed it were noticed at all by the driver. No truck has dual controls, and so there’d be the odd “Whoooaaah!” from instructors if say a right-turn at a T-junction commenced too soon would have taken say the traffic-light with it.
I did though pass each driving-test at first attempt, like a shooting star burning itself out before its time. Having done so at the ‘reversing into a parking spot’ was ever so pleasing, requiring much the same skill as playing hoopla with a bag over your head. And in fact everything the government had been saying proved to be right: there was a shortage of lorry-drivers in the UK, even if not necessarily the type I were. In order to get a job I eschewed looking at a laptop and instead just called up numbers painted on the back of trailers. Which is how I would land my first role, driving chemicals or containers from factory to plant, or plant to port.
I sat at the helm of a Mercedes on Day One, a man at the open side-window telling me that this lever did this and this button did that, and then suggesting I follow the truck in front ~ a bit like ‘Red Leader’ from RAF days ~ as he careered along the East Lancs road and onto Manchester’s rush-hour orbital M60. It required the sort of derring-do that had been familiar to me from decades in cockpits of one sort or another. In fact at the very outset, during an interregnum between university and the let-down that was life itself, I had found myself actually hitch-hiking through Richmond Park, one of the London ‘royal parks’. A man had drawn up in a Volvo and turned out to have been at one time the sort of auxiliary pilot who’d transport aircraft of various types between one base and another (the only role women were in fact allowed in the UK during WW2).
How was it, I had asked him? Well he would pitch up late afternoon or in the early evening, the chances were, and without so much as a risk assessment or high-visibility tabard he’d be handed a Pilot Manual to brush up with over lavish dinner at the Officer’s Mess and a few beers in the bar afterward. Then he’d wander out to whatever transport/bomber/fighter it happened to be, and kicked some tyres and lit the fires. Spellbinding.
I turned to thank him at the gatehouse on Kingston Hill where the park gave on to the avenue where I was staying, with the family of one of the ‘names’ at Lloyds of London.
“Good luck in life.” he said. Dead now, maybe… but living on in hearts.
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