Ever had one of those days where you wish you’d never got out of bed? 
Wed 23rd May.
Got text message from the agency asking if I wanted to work at Wincanton Somerfield Bridgwater on Saturday and Monday of the forthcoming (Bank Holiday) weekend, and that I could choose my start times.
I wasn’t particularly keen, as it’s a 90-mile round trip, so replied to say that I’d prefer something closer, but I’d do it if they were desperate. A few minutes later, got the confirmation message.
Saturday 26th May.
Reasonably quiet trip down the M5 given it’s the Saturday at the start of a May Bank Holiday Weekend. Sedgemoor MSA is choc-a-block with caravans, and someone seemed to have spread the contents of their suitcase all over the carriageway, but no major holdups.
Arrive in the transport office at my booked time of 08:00. Start filling in the standard agency driver forms, only to be called in by the shift manager to say that I wasn’t booked. 
I grab my phone, and show him the text asking me to do Somerfield Bridgwater on Saturday and Monday. He is still insisting that I’m booked for Monday, but not Saturday.
I then check the confirmation text. “Confirmed 8am Saturday Sainsbury Monday Somerfield”.
[zb] [zb] [zb] [zb] [zb] [zb] [zb] [zb] [zb] [zb]
That’ll teach me to read the confirmations more closely… 
So I ring the agency guy (waking him up - got to make him work for his cut of my wages, after all 
) and ask him to check that Sainsbury’s still want me if I’m an hour late (they do), and hot-foot it back up the M5, pretty much past my house (which is about 10 mins from Sainsbury’s RDC), getting there for about 08:45.
Walk into the transport office, fill in more forms , and get told to wait for my load. My lateness obviously isn’t a major problem, as there’s a queue of drivers waiting for loads.
Eventually I get allocated a 26t rigid for deliveries to two local stores - one in North Bristol, and one in Central Bath. The first delivery isn’t due until 12:00, so when I find a headlamp bulb out on the truck, I’ve got loads of time to go and get it replaced.
I arrive at the store at about 10:30, and they ask me to wait as they haven’t got enough room to take the stuff. The store is a small “local”, and has no dedicated loading bay. I’m parked on a single-yellow that’s supposed to be “loading only”, so after half an hour of waiting I tell the store that I’m going to go away and come back at the booked time. For those of you who know the area, it’s Gloucester Road, Bishopston, which is basically like a busy high street, and has lots of traffic going up and down it, and I’m causing more of an obstruction than I would like. They also have very active traffic wardens, so I decide that a strategic retreat is in order.
There isn’t really anywhere suitable nearby to park up without upsetting the locals (since I’ve got the fridge running), so I end up going back out to the A4174 and parking in a layby. I then go in for my second assault, arriving about 12:10. They’re still not ready, but this time they either have to take the goods or refuse them (as I’m on-time for the delivery), so they do a bit of shuffling around and make some space.
On opening the back of the truck, I find out what a [zb] job the loaders have done. The truck is split into a single-cage lane on the left, and a double-cage lane on the right. On the single cage lane, they’ve loaded an almost empty two-sided cage just in front of a fully-loaded one. The fully-loaded one has tipped forwards into the empty one, lifting up the load restraining bar out of its cup (because the little clip which is supposed to drop into place is missing). Since they only bothered to put one bar on, the whole single cage lane has been allowed to run loose, and stuff is everywhere. 
I manage to salvage most of it, but lose a couple of crates of coke cans and a crate of lemonade bottles, which have all burst.
Anyway, the stuff is eventually unloaded, the damages signed for, and I’m off to my next store in Bath.
The main Bath store isn’t too bad, but again, this one’s a “Local”, so it’s a small store right in the very centre. I have to park at the side of the (one-way) road just after a bend, and it’s on a busy bus route. The busses only have just enough room to squeeze around the corner, but they can get round.
Offloading isn’t too bad, and I then re-load with a load of empty cages before leaving.
Thought it had already gone wrong? You ain’t read nothin’ yet.
About 50 metres from the store, I have to squeeze past a van parked at the side of the road opposite some hoardings put up to protect building work. The road is only 10" wider than the truck. Ahead, there’s another parked car sticking out a bit more, and as I start to turn to get around him, I hear a horrible cracking sound. The rear overhang of the truck had swung across and squashed the wing mirror of the parked van. 
I stopped and took all the details (including the measurements above 
), then went back to base and spent the next hour filling in accident forms and describing the incident to the office guy in excruciating detail…
During the debrief they also go through your Isotrak record to see how you’ve done - it showed that I’d waited in the A4174 layby (yes, it actually said “A4174 layby”) for a while - I didn’t realise that it tracked you in that much detail… 
All of that done, and I still haven’t done my 8 hours yet, so they give me another run, this time to Emerson’s Green - about 2 miles from the RDC. At least this time they give me an artic, and I get to use my digital tacho card again - the rigid was an older truck, but most of the artic fleet is now digital.
This time it’s a nice easy drop - they’ve cleared out the yard a lot more since I was last there, so I get on the bay pretty quickly with only a couple of shunts to get it properly straight, and everything comes off nice and easily.
Finally clocked off at 20:30 and glad to go home…
Monday 28th May
Arrived at 08:00 at the transport office in Wincanton Somerfield Bridgwater and filled in yet more forms. When they ask, I tell them that I have been there before, but it’s more than two years ago, so they send me out with one of their assessors to show me the trucks (they’ve now got Volvo I-Shift gearboxes), and to show me how to couple up correctly. Apparently split-coupling is now banned on all Wincanton sites, so I have to couple on an angle.
Anyway, it’s all sorted out, and the assessor seems happy, so it’s out on the road. My drops are in Okehampton and Liskeard, then pick up a backload from Tulip (which I later work out is Roach Foods where I’ve been before for Samworth Bros) in Bodmin.
I make a quick stop in Exeter MSA to set up the SatNav, then run down into Okehampton.
The map I’ve been given gets me to the store OK, but it then tells me to go past the store, and turn right after the CO-OP into the council car and lorry park where I can turn around and come back ready for a good-side reverse.
All well and good, except that the CO-OP is now Waitrose, and, more importantly, the council car and lorry park is now the Waitrose deliveries yard, blocked off by a locked gate.
I’ve now gone past the store on my left, and there’s a 7.5t weight limit less than 50m ahead, so I have a go at doing a blindside reverse into the bay, but it’s too tight, and give up. I get the store to stop the traffic and reverse past the roundabout at the entrance to the loading bay, then do what I should have done in the first place - turn right at the roundabout, and reverse back onto the bay.
Unloading is reasonably smooth except for a pallet containing about two cubic metres of sugar which really didn’t want to come off. Eventually with a bit of playing around with the tail lift angle, I managed to get it on, and I was off down to Liskeard.
The map I’ve got is a typical Somerfield one - hand-drawn, showing just roundabouts, with no road names, so it’s very difficult to follow - e.g. is that small mini-roundabout the one on the map or not?
I programmed the store into the SatNav, but it kept on trying to direct me onto roads that looked way too narrow (I’d be a bit concerned taking a Transit van down them, let alone a full-length artic), so I carried on, looking for what looked like a suitable access point. Eventually I realised that I must have passed the correct turning, and started looking for somewhere to turn. However, everywhere I found didn’t look very nice - either a blindside reverse into a side-road, or side road too narrow, or road too busy. I carried on for a while thinking “there must be somewhere better further ahead”, but the road got narrower and narrower, and then got very twisty. Eventually I found a turning which, although not ideal, was possible to turn around in, so I bit the bullet and went for it, figuring that if I didn’t turn around soon, I was in danger of getting completely stuck, and having to reverse half a mile or so up a twisty, hilly road, which basically wasn’t going to happen without some kind of major calamity.
I got it around after a few shunts, then went back up the twisty bits (having to tell a few car drivers on the way that there was no way that I could get around the corner with their car on the inside as my trailer would squash it), and once the road opened out, I stopped for a look at the maps. A kind local who had been held up by me turning around stopped and told me where the turning was for the Somerfield store. Whew 
When I got there, there was still another artic unloading, so I had a 5 minute or so wait, and then had to reverse in myself. It wasn’t too bad, as the loading bay was off the town car park, which was virtually empty. It was a blindside reverse in, but although I GOALed a couple of times, I didn’t take any shunts 
A nice easy run down to Bodmin then ensued (with a 30-minute break to finish off the 15 I took at Exeter), and then went immediately onto the bay at Roach for a trailer swap.
The run back to Bridgwater was uneventful, and after a quick refuelling session and dumping the trailer, I was off home.
I can’t say I was that impressed with the I-shift. It was reasonably good for general driving, but there were two niggles.
Firstly, although it didn’t seem to suffer from kangarooing as much as the DAF AS-tronic, it did do it a bit on the difficult manouevring, particularly when I was doing the tight turn.
Secondly, Wincanton have fitted their own “modification” consisting of a metal box which prevents you from using any position other than A, N or R. In particular, you can’t put it into manual mode. When slowing down going up hills, the gearbox only ever changed down right at the very bottom of the green band, and then the rev counter only went up to the middle of the green band. As a result, whenever I hit any kind of hill, the truck just seemed to die, languishing in the bottom quarter of the green band, whereas an earlier change down of gears would have kept the engine ticking over nicely near the top of the band, and it would have climbed the hills much more easily.