When I was an HGV driver one of the things I most enjoyed about the job was the feeling of freedom it gave me. Nobody looking over my shoulder to see what I was doing; nobody telling me how to do my job better; nobody telling me what they thought of me. As long as the job was done to everyone's satisfaction it didn't really matter about the details. This small freedom was a privilege and I understood that, so I always tried to do my job as well as I possibly could. I made sure my lorry was loaded correctly, always had the right maps for the journey (I couldn't afford a sat-nav) and I planned my route well, in order to avoid any screw-ups.
I knew that if I got something very wrong, like taking the wing-mirrors off a row of parked cars or scraping the top of the lorry under a low bridge, it wouldn't be long before I got a phone call from my transport manager. This was because the company logo and phone number was written six feet high along each side of the truck's tarpaulin curtains and it would have been very easy for a passer-by to get on the phone and complain. Because I always had this in mind I was always careful and I always drove considerately.
It seemed fair enough that someone would want to make a phone call to the office about something serious, effectively taking sides with my employer, but what about more trivial matters? Where does the benefit of the doubt tip back in favour of the employee?
Recently I was sitting in traffic behind a BT engineer's van, and while we were waiting at a red traffic light the driver wound down his window and out of his mouth flew a lump of phlegm the size of a small bird. It didn't land on anyone's car, it didn't hit a pensioner, it just landed in the road. No harm done.
The worrying thing wasn't the driver's behaviour (he might have gone to work that morning whilst battling with a very bad cold); it was how I reacted that bothered me. I instantly looked at the back of the van to see who owned it, then I thought "oh, well that's not very BT, is it?" I don't think I looked for a "How Am I Driving?" sticker, but that doesn't really let me off the hook.
Perhaps it was because the van looked so new and clean and on-message, but I'd effectively confused this bronchial telephone engineer with the glossy, high budget BT advertising I'd been watching on telly. It was as if I was expecting him to act as if he was in some kind of faux-reality viral marketing campaign and he'd let me down by just being a person in a van.
This started me thinking about how I have allowed myself to invest so much in the brands I buy and use (and I'm sure I'm not alone) that I seem to expect at least some of the reality to live up to the hype.
The gobbing out of the window event was tiny but it has given me a new outlook on things and I have begun to remember what it was like when the people we encounter every day were simply that: people like us, at work - not brand ambassadors or carbon-based representations of their employers' corporate vision.
So, the next time I see a Tesco delivery driver doing a u-turn on a cycle path or a postman picking his nose I will try and remember not to judge too harshly. Who knows, this new positive mental attitude might be enough to stop me photographing police vans parked on the double yellow lines outside the chippy, while the coppers wait for their sausage dinners. Probably not, though.
