Sticks and Stones

Harsh words from disgruntled customers? It’s all in a day’s work

- Bill Dean

There’s a policeman in the back office waiting to see you.” Not the words I wanted to hear as I pulled my Hiab wagon into the yard. I was contracted to work out of a DIY store doing craned-off deliveries of building materials to mainly retail customers. “The store manager’s with him. Have you hit something again?”

I knew I hadn’t, but that was no guarantee trouble wasn’t looming. The work involved squeezing a full length six-wheeler down crowded and badly parked suburban streets to the drops.

Then I had to crane off unstable pallets of bricks etc over cars the customer hadn’t bothered to get moved, so there was always the chance of a bumped door mirror or worse. There was also the fact that my arrival, heralded by the shrieking “Warning. Warning. Vehicle reversing,” had every net curtain twitching to see the store’s logo and contact details. Store management also tended to throw credit notes like confetti at any complaint raised by members of the public, and word had spread. So, my wagon got blamed when damage had been done by someone else.

The best example of this occurred one Saturday. I had a wood delivery on a cul de sac. The customer, a pensioner, asked me if I could get it in his back garden, ready for his son to use the next day. It was quite normal to be asked for the crane to deliver over a house, into a garage or round corners. The store staff promised the impossible to clinch a sale.

This usually involved saying I would drive across grass verges, down alleys and jib two tons of plasterboard through a third-storey window. The difference between what a customer had been told I would do and what I could achieve was a flash point, and I got the brunt of their anger.