Driver Jatt

Glad that Gig is over – Multidrop

I’ve been doing multi-drop work recently. It’s horrible. Between 120 to 200 visits to residential addresses throughout Birmingham (and also a place up North). I have done this stuff before but never in Brum and ideally I’d not like to do that again.

I’ll list just ‘some’ of the issues I came across…

😠 Knock door. “Someone’s at the door, you answer it, no you do it, who is it, etc, etc” now multiply this for the the whole frickin day!

😠 Folk who just won’t open the door until you phone them and tell them you’re at their front door to deliver x, y, z. “Oh it’s you at the door.” I have no idea in what universe people just get random blokes holding kids medicines standing at the door but it’s a thing. I guess.

😠 Them ‘Ring’ doorbells. Great idea. When they work and are actually used!

😠 Folk who live in high rise buildings where the intercom doesn’t work and they never have reception on their phone either. Why bother!

😠 Dogs, seriously. Control them. At one stage I called a customer and told them to meet me at the end of their drive. Their dog was the size of a horse and looked very menacing!

😠 The job kills your van. Wear and tear is accelerated significantly.

😠 The rules of the road go out the window as you’re focused on meeting deadlines and getting these deliveries done. Everything else becomes secondary.

😠 Absolutely no time to eat, drink or pee.

So what effect did multidrop have on me?

😭 After a weekend of doing it I did not want to see a steering wheel again.

😭 I lost all creativity and couldn’t think of anything other than making them deliveries.

😭 I HATED not being able to deliver in case folk aren’t home or in the case of one guy. He padlocked his green gate shut. Then complained he isn’t getting any deliveries 😁

😭 After if I finished the day I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I just wanted to be left alone somewhere quiet. Extremely irritable and this is where drivers need to check themselves as these frustrations can easily come out on those closest to you. Don’t let that happen. Plenty of worthwhile subjects on the road to let it out on.

😭 Stress levels and intolerance for stupid drivers went through the roof.

😭 I started to really not look forward to the weekends.

So why did I feel such a way. Other than the horrific standard of driving from some of the locals I pinned it down to one binary factor.

It was the route optimisation system the NHS supplied to me. More of that on a separate post though.

You know how something is being done wrong, you know it’s done wrong and you are powerless to stop it. Yeah, it’s that draining. Sucks the life out of you. And this is why the whole multidrop gig I was doing sucked. Not the work itself but the tools that we were given to assist us done everything other than assist.

Meh 😶

So, do you need a courier who lost the will to live just after doing a bit of multi-drop? Naaa, I thought you wouldn’t 😁