The rough with the smooth

There are good weeks - there are occasionally excellent weeks! - but from time to awfully frequent time there are also bad weeks.  You know the sort of thing ... when someone jokes in the silence, "Come on, - it's time to turn the phone back on now." ... when there are so many people stuffed into a small space that there's nowhere to swing a newspaper, and don't even think of getting up to go to the loo or make a drink, because the seat won't be awaiting your return!

This week has been one such week.  By Thursday night I'd managed a tally worth something less than two and a half days' income.  If you take off known expenses and fuel, there would not be enough left over to pay the rent on my flat, let alone find a crust to eat (if one were daft enough to think of a week in total isolation like that, that is!)  It's on days like this that crew-room chat expresses dissatisfaction of some kind.  Sometimes it will be between drivers, alleging some underhand practice that has secured a perceived advantage over others.  On other occasions, like this week, the general undercurrent is 'anti-establishment'.

Some of us have been assigned jobs on a particular contract whose terms involve the return of packaging and rubbish after delivery, and require that this be taken back to the customer whence it came.  The price agreed for the contract is intended to include this additional work.  Because it is more than is done as part of a normal job, some drivers are looking for some clearly additional payment for it and, as an act of defiance, they have started leaving the rubbish outside our office.  When a notice was posted up threatening that they wouldn't get paid for the job unless this aspect is completed as well, some of these recusants simply said that they would refuse these jobs in future.

Since we are all self-employed, that is always our prerogative.  However, it does beg the question of to what extent their services will be used if they are not going to do all is entailed in any particular job.  I found myself engaged in endless discussion with one of these, who simply could not see (or would not!) that the price for each job is fixed, and that we either do or don't do each job - as required by the customer - for the price accorded to it.  The fact that in the vast majority of cases we simply accept what we hear as an instruction, doesn't detract from its contractual status as offer and acceptance of that job on those terms.  He could only see the situation as 'them' getting something for nothing from 'us'.

Today, by contrast to those foregoing, presented me with a different rough and smooth.  It was a full day from beginning to end.  But it started with a pair of jobs that it was impossible to fulfil properly alongside each other, because both were for 9.0 collection and 12 noon delivery.  Unavoidably, I was early to collect one and late for the other, and then late to fulfil that one as well.  And then, on the way home, came a third job that involved difficulty in locating the pick-up point, hidden deep within the uninspiring brick buildings of a former airfield, problems in first assembling and then loading the goods, and then equal trouble in finding the delivery point.   This was partly because there was no company name outside, and partly because, though the name of the building was prominent on the front of the building, it was quite small, and the wall was some distance from the road, on the far side of the car park.

Individually, each of these snags would simply be grist to the mill of daily life, but coming together like this, it's almost as if things are conspiring against me.  I'm just glad that the weekend has arrived, with the chance to rest and recover a little before the next chapter of 'Life on Four Wheels'.