One End of a Week ... and the Other

Although I didn't realise it at the time, last weekend I was in the midst of a unique (so far) series of jobs.  My old friend the Repeating Genie had adopted a new guise and, in the space of just four days, I did no less than six jobs for one particular customer in nearby Stotfold.  It's not uncommon for the same job to be repeated a number of times within a few weeks, if a customer is fulfilling a protracted delivery schedule; in fact, it makes sense for the same driver to be used, because after the first time the location and personnel are familiar and provide continuity for the customer and increased satisfaction for the driver.  But amongst these six were four different jobs, and all for the same customer.

It began last Thursday afternoon, when I delivered several bundles of part-finished items from our customer's premises to a firm in Bedford to have further work carried out on them; this job was repeated on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning.  Meanwhile, my first job on Friday was to collect for them from a firm in Walsall (this was the pallet whose securing I extolled in my post last week).  Monday morning's activities included the collection of materials for them from a warehouse in Bicester, upon delivery of which I collected the second load of part-processed items for Bedford, and the same thing happened at lunchtime on Tuesday, when I delivered materials I had brought for them from the delightfully-named Hampton Lovett in Worcestershire.

When the same roads figure again and again in the course of a few days' work, the mind tends to wander, and I think it was Tuesday when my eye caught a row of council houses in the village of Moggerhanger ... houses past which I must have driven hundreds of times on my way to and from Bedford.  My mind went back to the estate where my cousin and I grew up in adjoining streets of such houses in Norfolk.  I had often compared my home to my cousin's, without particularly wondering about the reasons for the differences between them, beyond the fact that one was about three years older than the other.  I now questioned whether these that I was now passing might be the same layout as either of those houses with which I had been familiar in childhood, or of yet another design.  From the outside, the style of windows and brickwork seemed to cry out "late-'forties-early-'fifties", i.e. dating from the same era as our early homes.

My father was a farm worker, and ours was one of six houses built around a small roundabout that were said to be specifically 'for farm workers'.  On one hand, their designation for this purpose could simply have been to relieve the pressure caused by farmers no longer willing to provide tied cottages for their workers.  On the other hand, I failed to see any way in which the design of those dwellings could provide for any specific needs of farm workers as opposed to tenants engaged in any other occupation: after all, their work would be carried out on the farm, not at home!  The basic difference between my cousin's home and my own was that their kitchen extended from the back of the house into a living area with a window to the front, whereas our kitchen was confined to the rear, and the corresponding front window was in a totally separate room.  Both houses had another living room stretching from front to back on the opposite side of a central hallway.

The puzzles of the past must remain there.  Meanwhile I'm aware that recent posts here have neglected the minutiae of my daily assignments throughout the week.  This is almost certainly a good thing, but let me just give you an insight into the variety - and busy-ness - of yesterday.  When I went to Ireland the other week I had missed an evening training session.  While I fundamentally disapprove of training in our own time, rather than during the day, I would have gone along with everyone else had I not been elsewhere.  However, yesterday I was invited to rectify this lost opportunity once I'd completed two early jobs.  I was half-way through the 'excitement' of learning how to prevent medicines becoming contaminated or spilt whilst in my custody, when the controller begged the trainer to release me in order to satisfy a particular job that was becoming urgent owing to the mysterious habit of manufacturing firms to leave off early on Friday afternoons.  You'll not be surprised to know that this didn't exactly disappoint me.

On my way back from this, I was diverted to another job which is a daily regular, although I haven't done it for some weeks.  Sadly the security officer at this establishment was a stand-in, and neither he nor I knew the specific detail that no one had told him, i.e. whom he should call when I arrived to collect parcels for an international forwarding company.  Overcoming this deficiency involved several phone calls and took quite a while, and once the job had been successfully completed, any idea of resuming the training session was far from anyone's thoughts, as the end of a busy day drew ever nearer.  I was asked whether I would be available for more work; when I said I would, I was offered a choice of two jobs to East Anglia, or a combination of Tyneside and Edinburgh.  Having no desperate commitments today, I decided to choose the longer distance.

After also collecting a Tender for delivery in Southampton on Monday, I made hasty preparations for a night out, and found myself taking two items to a delightfully-designed (from what I could see by street lighting and moonlight) modern housing complex in Gateshead, and then delivering two stents to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.  This latter job was, strangely, accompanied by an instruction to call a mobile no. when I arrived.  I did so, expecting the answer to come from someone within the hospital who would then emerge to take charge of the goods.  Not so.  My interlocutor explained that he was, in fact, in Paris; he simply advised that I should make my way to the Emergency Entrance, one place where he knew I would be able to obtain access to the hospital.  Here I was given the necessary directions to the theatre suite, where I made my delivery, but I then had to overcome the difficulties presented by one-way doors only negotiable in the opposite direction by staff with the appropriate electronic pass!  Amazingly, I eventually emerged nearer to my van than I had entered, and at 2.0 am began my slow journey home, interrupted by the anticipated stops for sleep and food, and food and sleep as nature dictated.