One consequence of driving every day is that I am seeing, and being affected by, many more road traffic incidents. Yesterday I was stuck for nearly an hour and a half when they closed the M25 after a bad crash.

What is it about car crashes that holds such a morbid fascination? Why do people slow down so much to “rubber neck” that they block up the other side of motorways? Even though I really hate the idea of people being hurt I still get a strange thrill passing an incident. Is it the feeling of “There but by the grace of god…”? Are we made more aware of our mortality and the fragility of our lives and this gives us a thrill as we realise how lucky we are? Is it a hidden desire for blood and gore and voilence that for most of us has been sanitised out of every day life?

I often wonder the same about violent television or films. What makes someone want to write stories that horrify us? Why do people want to spend whole careers perfecting the ability to realistically recreate gore and bloody suffering? Why do people watch their work?

Not sure I have any answers. Do you?

One of the consequences of being an agency driver is that I am working for different clients all the time with different processes and different products. This keeps things interesting.

But it also means that most of the drops that I do are for the first time. As a consequence I rarely know what is in store for me at the start of the day. Locations that can become easy when you have done them even once can be really testing when you have no idea what is involved. Finding my way into several very large Central London building projects, in my very large truck, yesterday was testing.

I never know what I am going to be doing until I get into that day’s company depot in the morning. There is still a knot in my stomach as I pick up my duty sheet for the day but I am getting better at finding this an exciting challenge rather than a terrifying ordeal!

Whenever I say that I am setting out on a career in truck driving people invariably say something like “you must be mad – that is all going to be automated soon”.

Err…no…

Maybe the long haul stuff between Regional Distribution Centres, maybe in American cities with their more regimented grid systems, but everything else? You must be kidding.

Most of my work is what is known as multi-drop. Up to eight or ten deliveries in a day, many of them in remote areas with windy country lanes, or in Central London with it’s gloriously random patterns of roads.

A lot of the firms I have worked for deliver into building sites. By definition building sites are new. They are often not reliably mapped yet and the Sat Nav often gets their location really wrong.

Once you get there navigating around the site is a nightmare, despite the Site Managers’ and Traffic Managers’ best efforts. Every time you visit the site there is a different combination of parked vehicles, skips, moving fork lifts, scaffolding extending beyond the perimeter of buildings. It’s a real challenge and changes day by day.

The thought of an AI system having enough information to not only get to the site but to manage entry and exit is a joke.

My guess is that most of the areas being eyed hungrily by the tech companies selling the benefits of automation and AI will have their own equivalents of “the last mile”. That gloriously messy and unpredictable junction between theory and practice, between order and chaos, where our best laid plans meet the real world and we have to grapple with that world to get anything to work!

Why my brain hurts.

In many ways the actual driving is the easiest bit of my truck driving day. Getting stuff on and off can be challenging and hard work but by far the hardest thing is the sums!

I have to keep so many rules about driving time, working time, time to next stop etc in my head that it really hurts. To get a sense of that complexity watch this video from KevTee which attempts to make things easier. Stick with it long enough to feel your brain aching like mine does every day!