Am I alone in liking vans?

August 4 – At the end of the day I’m seriously wondering if I need to book another holiday, very soon.

The end of the day is late. It did genuinely seem to have been quiet whilst I was away. Today the proverbial hit – and as East is away and I’m covering for him so I had to pick it up.

A customer had an inspection in a regulatory area where our kit is used this morning, and it was claimed the kit failed. As a result they were told they had to shut their premises. Unsurprisingly the customer was not amused, and since they’re valuable it was straight into reaction mode, and of I went to the site. Two engineers were despatched as well, all of us (me included) in vans to make sure every possible spare might get there, in duplicate at least.

Converging on the premises about two hours after the call out (nothing sooner was possible)customer tempers were already frayed. So I had to immediately take on the task of placating management whilst our two guys went about testing what supposedly was going on.

This was when the bafflement started: it did not take long for the first to report to me he could see no problem. But with two people and three vans on site we had lots of testing kit so I told them to restart tests all over again to see if there was any issue.

We did a second lot of tests. No problem. So I told them to try to simulate a potential problem of the sort that might cause a failure and see if there was a problem. None was found.

So we replaced the supposedly faulty equipment. No problem found.

So we called the regulatory people – who had offered to re-test knowing that the customer would want to re-open ASAP. Their chap called again. They tested. The kit failed.

We tested again. It passed.

We were left with one option: we challenged the regulator’s kit’s calibration. So we tested that. Their kit was very obviously giving false readings, in our opinion.

They called in another person. With different regulator equipment our kit passed – no problem at all.
Very, very annoying. Anyone can make a mistake. But at least we came out in the clear. And the customer apologised for their earlier annoyance.

But it made a flipping long day. By the time it was done we were knackered, hungry and all had long journeys home. But I took the guys for a quick burger to say thanks – they did a first rate job, and stayed calm and professional throughout.

And for me the best bit? Well, I should say it was keeping the customer happy. But I admit, am I alone in being someone who actually enjoys driving vans? I have no idea why – but I think i prefer them to cars.