Refuse Collection Vehicles

In February 1997 my boss Percy telephoned me to tell me that he had heard of a new type of refuse collection vehicle with impressive labour saving innovations that offered huge operational savings and that he was interested in finding out more.  He asked me if I would be prepared to visit the factory where they were manufactured and give him my opinion.  To be honest I had very little interest in bin carts or how they are made but fortunately, before I could decline, he happened to mention that the factory was in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States of America and as quick as a flash my lack of interest transformed into complete and total enthusiasm.  Did I want to visit Phoenix to see some dustcarts?  You bet I did!

I couldn’t believe my luck and enjoyed four days in the United States where as well as having to visit the Heil refuse collection truck factory, which quite frankly was a bit of a bore, I also got to visit the Grand Canyon and enjoy some top class hospitality.  This was a really good trip and on reflection I decided that refuse vehicle manufacture was actually rather interesting after all.  We posted the report of our visit (missing out the drinking bits of course) and offered our availability for any similar official trips in the future.

This was a good move because the following year I was sent to La Rochelle in France to look at Semat refuse trucks and later in the same year I went to Milan to see the Brivio factory.  It’s amazing how interesting refuse trucks can suddenly become when there is an all expenses overseas trip involved.  Later the Company set up a centralised purchasing unit under a greedy procurement manager who saved the best gigs for themselves and that was the end of the factory visits and the overseas travel but believe me I enjoyed it while it lasted.

The company never did buy a Heil sideloading refuse vehicle, they were absolutely useless for use in the United Kingdom, but I have to say that they were brilliant at hospitality.  Jack Allen folded and went out of business just a short while afterwards, which was a shame and the Heil Engineering Plant in Phoenix that had opened in 1990 was closed down in August 2003 and production was switched to Fort Payne in Alabama.

In June 1991 the company (Cory Environmental) made arrangements for all the managers to attend the conference and exhibition and we stayed at the Maycliffe Hotel in St Luke’s Road in Torquay.  I had already started to become accustomed to uncontrolled drinking bouts at the expense of the company whilst staying in hotels but the annual IWM conference was the equivalent of the FA Cup Final or the Eurovision Song Contest because at this event everyone went crazy.

Every June everyone in the waste management industry used to travel down to Paignton in Devon for the annual waste management conference and there were three nights of unlimited hospitality because all of the big supply companies were there and wanted to impress and sell and were prepared to pay for it.  The big event and the one everyone lusted to get a ticket for was the Dennis Eagle banquet because this promised good food and high class entertainment but there was also plenty of food and drink from their competitors Jack Allen and the street sweeping vehicle manufacturers Johnson and Scarab.  As well as the big events there were lots of fringe companies trying to impress, wheelie bin, plastic sacks, protective clothing and tyres and they all hospitality budgets that we were eager to help them spend.

All of that extravagance must have been a financial burden because as well as Jack Allen and Heil, Dennis Eagle went out of business on 11^th December 2006.

Dustcarts in Phoenix Arizona

Before I moved to Lincolnshire I used to work for a French waste management company called Onyx UK that was attempting to take over refuse collection services in the UK and I worked at a depot in Maidenhead in Berkshire and managed the Windsor contract.

One day in October 1997 the Managing Director, a man called Percy Powell, telephoned me to tell me that he had heard of a new type of refuse collection vehicle with impressive labour saving innovations that offered potentially huge operational efficiencies and that he was interested in finding out more.  He asked me if I would be prepared to visit the factory where they were manufactured and give him my opinion.

To be honest I had very little interest in dustcarts, how they worked or how they are made but fortunately, before I could prematurely decline, he happened to mention that the factory was in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States of America and almost instantaneously my lack of interest transformed into complete and total enthusiasm.  Did I want to visit Phoenix to see some dustcarts?  You bet I did!

And so a couple of weeks later on a miserable wet autumn day I drove to Heathrow Airport and met my travelling companions in the departure lounge; Dave who worked for the company and who, despite having no real technical background or training, had managed to convince everyone that he was an expert on vehicles and procurement, Keith who was a contract manager from Norwich and who was just as mystified as I was why he had the good fortune to be selected for this task, but like me wasn’t complaining, and then there was Allan and Ben who worked for the vehicle manufactures Jack Allen and who hoped to interest us in their exciting new dustcart range.

It was a long flight with North West Airlines but there was free drink and hot food and we made each other laugh while we misbehaved like excitable little boys going to summer camp and the first leg of the journey passed surprisingly quickly and after eight hours we landed in Dallas, Texas to make our connecting flight to Phoenix.  This involved a tedious four hour wait hanging around the shopping malls and the book shops which was excruciatingly dull, but we also spent some time, well, most of it actually, in the airport bar which was a much better alternative and it gave Dave the opportunity to begin his quest to spend Allan’s entire years hospitality budget in just three days.  Dave it seemed had a gluttonous appetite for beer and burgers and it started right here in Dallas.

Finally we made the second leg of our journey to Phoenix, or to be strictly accurate, Scottsdale, and once successfully through passport control and the typically unfriendly US customs we picked up the people carrier hire vehicle and made the short journey to the motel where we had reservations courtesy of Jack Allen.  We had been travelling for sixteen hours and Allan, Ben and Keith all declared themselves weary and ready for bed but Dave wasn’t finished just yet and he coerced me into going to the bar for last drinks and a final burger.

The term ‘last drinks’ usually implies a quick twenty minute round up but once Dave had got the taste for the beer, Allan’s room number for charging it to and fallen in love with the attractive woman behind the bar we stayed for a good long session until, way past reasonable closing time, she  finally ran out of patience and decided to call time!

My travelling companions…

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These are the full Waste Management chronicles:

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

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An Inappropriate Visit To The Moulin Rouge

“That is the Can-can. The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a woman; and kick as high as you can, no matter which sex you belong to. There is no word of exaggeration in this. Any of the staid, respectable, aged people who were there that night can testify to the truth of that statement.”                                               Mark Twain – ‘The Innocents Abroad’

Between 1995 and 2000 I worked for a French company called Onyx UK and they used to take us away frequently for management meetings and we stayed in expensive hotels and hung out in bars and nice restaurants but what was best was that once a year we all assembled at Waterloo station and they put us on Eurostar train and took us through the tunnel to Paris for an annual conference.

One year when they were really showing off after buying out a competitor they took us to the Moulin Rouge for a special treat and we had champagne to drink and an extravagant stage show to watch.  Although they would have negotiated a group discount on account of there being about eighty of us someone told me later that this demonstration of extravagant folly cost the company over £8,000 which was about the equivalent of the annual salary of one of the street cleaners that it employed.  To his credit my friend Mike Jarvis refused to go because he didn’t consider it appropriate to accompany female colleagues to what he described as a strip-club but I did not share his lofty moral objections, declared it to be an up-market strip club and happily accepted my ticket for the meal and the show.

The Moulin Rouge opened on 6^th October 1889 in a building at the foot of the Montmartre hill. Its creators were savvy businessmen who understood perfectly what Parisian society wanted and they created a nightclub to allow the very rich to go legitimately to the fashionable but seedy district of Montmartre where they could demonstrate egalitarian virtues and mix with workers, artists, prostitutes, the middle classes, businessmen, elegant women and foreigners visiting Paris.

By day the exterior of the Moulin Rouge is rather disappointing and the red windmill looks ridiculous and out of place on this Paris Boulevard but by night it is something completely different with glitzy lights, the whiff of gauloise on the evening air and a sense of anticipation as people turn up for the show. We arrived in two buses and were ushered through the lines of people waiting behind barriers who would gladly buy our tickets from us if we were prepared to sell and past ladies of dubious employment who would gladly accompany anyone who had a spare.

Walking along the corridor and through the doors into the interior was an awesome experience, like stepping back to Belle Époque turn of the century Paris into a room decorated in lavish red with rows of table lamps flickering like glow worms and columns adorned with Toulouse Lautrec posters and other appropriate memorabilia.  My first open–mouthed impression was that this was a magnificent venue with authentic mural paintings and columns with the original posters of the big name stars that have appeared here, somewhere that epitomised the golden age of peace, extravagance and optimism that was perfectly captured here in a sort of time capsule.  It isn’t especially big inside which gives it an intimate ambiance and this was emphasised when we squeezed into out allotted tables about half way back from the stage in between two rows of decorative gold fences that separated the eight hundred and fifty diners into convenient corrals for the waiters to serve tables.

The Galop from Jacques Offenbach’s ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’ is the tune most associated with the famous can-can dance which is a prominent feature of the entertainment and this played repeatedly in the background as the room began to fill and until the buzz of anticipation eventually drowned it out. Once everyone was in their seats the lights went down, the music exploded into the auditorium and the dancers in lavish costumes opened the two hour show with the iconic high kicking dance.

During the show there was an average three-course corporate entertainment meal and for our table of eight there was cheap champagne and a bottle of red and white wine which proved completely inadequate and was soon consumed.  We considered buying more but it was prohibitively expensive because the management doesn’t want tables full of boozed-up louts acting inappropriately, leering and wolf whistling at the women on stage so we stayed dry for the second half of the show with the intention of making up for it later back at our hotel.

After the show the room emptied quickly as guests were efficiently whisked away to the street for waiting taxis and transportation.  Our coaches were there and took us directly back to the hotel where Mike was sitting in the bar and over a drink or two remained indignantly uninterested in out tales of the evening’s entertainment, he didn’t want to know about the mime artist or the acrobat who balanced on chairs and he especially didn’t want to know about the half clothed dancers and on reflection, although I enjoyed it, I have to say that I agree with him.

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More tales of incompetence, waste and extravagance:

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

First Weekend as a Refuse Collection Contract Manager

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

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Onyx UK, SABU, FUBAB and Swan Upping

Onyx UK no longer exists as such and has been renamed Veolia Environmental Services (sounds impressive doesn’t it?) and its website claims that it ‘currently delivers refuse collection services to around five million residents in the UK… Working with Veolia Environmental Services means Local Authorities can be assured of receiving an efficient, reliable and responsive service.’  Well, things must have changed dramatically there as well because they turned out to be just as hopeless as Cory Environmental.

The main reason for this I put down to the fact that they were a French Company who came across the English Channel without any sort of useful business plan to try to exploit the privatisation of English council services without really understanding them.  This was a shame because before this the English had effectively kept the French out for over a thousand years but now Margaret Thatcher and her Tory cronies had simply invited them in.  As well as Onyx,  Sitaclean, also from France,  came as well and it wasn’t only the French because the Spanish company Focsa also turned up, the first time Spain had had a go at England since the Armarda in 1588.  By 1995 there were simply too many players in the game, which was driving prices down and as well as the European challenge there was BFI from the USA and the home grown companies of BIFFA, Cleanaway and Service Team.

This is Onyx House on the Mile End Road in east London.

The foreign companies sent over their up and coming senior managers and all of the trainee draft-dodging clever-dicks to come and try to tell us how to be better at something we had been doing rather well for a long time before their unwanted intervention.  Our Managing Director was a man called Edouard Dupont-Madinier (Ed knows best) who was a really agreeable and pleasant man and obviously cultured and intelligent but, to me anyway, never seemed especially comfortable managing a waste management business in England.

This by the way is a typical French business management model.  If a company is in trouble, it will parachute in a graduate of one of France’s Grande Ecoles, someone who has studied business theory and economics for ten years or so but who has never set foot in depot or done a day’s work on the factory floor.

The important thing to the French is leadership not experience and for that the day-to-day running of the company was actually undertaken by a loveable rascal called Percy Powell and while he was there it was a really good place to work.  You couldn’t tell the French anything of course on account of the fact that they were exactly that – French.  There is something uniquely arrogant about them which means that even when they are so obviously stupidly wrong they are always convinced that they are right!  And, what on earth made the French think that they could keep our streets clean when they can’t even deal with the dog waste problem on the pavements in their own country?

Working for Onyx resulted in a lot of head scratching!

When I moved to Onyx I swapped my clapped out Peugeot 405 (which had been driving up and down the M1 and around the M25 for three years) for a brand new Citroen Xantia and was based at Maidenhead and for a while just concentrated on making my new contract a success.  I found myself in unusual circumstances because this contract actually made a profit so there was no longer the day-to-day pressure of trying to improve the finances and explaining reoccurring monthly failure to the bosses.

The money was rolling in and the French really liked my contract because it was Royal and special and the Queen lived at Windsor so they kept bringing dignitaries and potential clients to visit and they always wanted to show off so we used to go to lunch at the Roux Brothers Michelin Star Restaurant on Monkey Island at Bray which must have cost a fortune in hospitality.  My friend and manager Mike Jarvis used to visit regularly and we would do a bit of work  in the morning and then have a nice lunch together at the White Hart in the nearby village of Holyport.  In the evenings we used to go to the Old Swan Uppers pub in  Cookham and after a meal and a few drinks stay overnight at the Company’s expense.  I was rarely under any pressure and life was good.

I didn’t complain of course but the French were equally as unfathomable as Cory Environmental when it came to spending unnecessary money.  Just as with Cory we stayed in expensive hotels and hung out in bars and nice restaurants but what was even better about Onyx was that once a year we all assembled at Waterloo station and they put us on Eurostar train and took us through the tunnel to Paris for an annual conference which was much, much better than Torbay and the IWM conference (even though we still went there as well).  One year when they were really showing off after buying out a competitor they took us to the Moulin Rouge for a special treat and we had champagne to drink and watch a variety show.  And they called this work!

With all of this extravagance you would have thought that the company was making a fortune and all of the contracts were highly profitable but not a bit of this was true and just as Cory Environmental the thing they really excelled at was getting tenders wrong, under pricing to win the work and then losing money in dramatic style.  Councils up and down the country from Berwick-on-Tweed in Northumberland to Teignbridge in Devon were all taking advantage of cut-price services and the French were subsidising council tax payers all over England by hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Another surprising thing was that although financial performance was woeful every April we all used to get a generous annual bonus of two or three thousand pounds each.  This was very nice but ridiculous because the company was going down the financial plughole fast.  I have to confess now that I contributed to that because I was part of the tendering team that successfully bid for the Wycombe contract and have to accept my full share of the blame.  Angela Sives, was the tendering manager, who, in a delicious twist of fate, later went on to work for Wycombe District Council as the Procurement Manager because presumably they thought she could do a great deal like that every time?

This one was a real shocker and although not quite on the Cory Environmental Southend scale, lost significant amounts of money from day one.

Thinking about this reminded me of the Onyx management method of assessing mistakes.  Basically there were two, a SABU and a FUBAB.  A SABU is a ‘Self Adjusting Balls Up‘ and not particularly critical, the sort of mistake that will put itself right with a bit of adjustment and covering up but a FUBAB, ‘A F*** Up Beyond All Belief’ is much more serious, impossible to cover up, requires lots of work to straighten it out and can be a potential career wrecker.  Well, believe me the Wycombe tender was a monumental FUBAB and one that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and was never put right.

In my opinion, the explanation why tenders were so consistently underbid was down to two reasons.  First the tendering team always assumed that the operational teams would be able to deliver everything according to plan and always in the most efficient way and sadly this was rarely the case.  Secondly because each tender went through a review process and at each stage as it travelled up through the company hierarchy someone would take something out here or reduce  resources there or make unrealistic assumptions about the whole bid and by the time they were signed off they were always another potential financial liability.

Imagine my surprise that despite my contribution to the Wycombe fiasco I was rewarded with an annual bonus just the same and shortly after that a promotion to Regional Manager of the North.  This was a huge region stretching from Berwick on Tweed on the Scottish border to Derby in the Midlands and from Boston, in Lincolnshire, on the east coast, to Copeland in Cumbria on the west.  In all there were thirteen contracts in the region and except for Trafford in Manchester they all made a loss.  The downside was that the regional office was in Derby and I had to live at home for a few months.

Luckily, being such a large region naturally involved huge amounts of travelling and being away from home meant more time in hotels and more hefty bar bills.  Eventually the company rented me a nice house in Richmond in Yorkshire and I had a very enjoyable year living in the Yorkshire Moors at their expense.  It was like being on a permanent holiday and disappointing therefore when Colin Whitehead, the previous Regional Manager (who had left and gone to work for Service Team, a competitor) decided he didn’t like it there after all and wanted to come back.

Being a mate of Percy he was reappointed and given his old region back and I was sent back to Windsor and Maidenhead with the compensation of a new Central Region, which unfortunately included the financial millstone of Wycombe.  And not just Wycombe because I also inherited a lot of unprofitable contracts from a man called Peter Clint who had cleaned out all the reserves and all the bargaining opportunities on the way out.  Peter was a bit of a crook, a chancer and a rogue and he stitched me up good and proper and later on was to gang up on me with others to lose me my job.

The real shocker however was that Windsor and Maidenhead was also beginning to lose money through the loss of profitable bits of the contract and the addition of new work that didn’t make any money at all, there was  a new council client manager who rather unreasonably expected us to do all of the work in the contract specification and Mike was too busy in another failing contract at Westminster to drop by and visit.

This is the Swan Uppers in Cookham.  Swan Uppers is a strange name don’t you think?  Well, here is the explanation:

Swan upping is a means of establishing a swan census, and today also serves to check the health of swans. Under a Royal Charter of the fifteenth century, the Vintners’ Company and the Dyers’ Company, two Livery Companies of the City of London, are entitled to share in the Sovereign’s ownership. They conduct the census through a process of ringing the swan’s feet, but the swans are no longer eaten.

Swan upping occurs annually during the third week of July. During the ceremony, the Queen’s, the Vintners’, and the Dyers’ Swan Uppers row up the river in skiffs and literally ‘lift’ the birds – hence ‘upping). Swans caught by the Queen’s Swan Uppers under the direction of the Swan Marker are unmarked, except for a ring linked to the database of the British Trust For Ornithology.

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More Waste Management Tales:

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

First Weekend as a Refuse Collection Contract Manager

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

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Onyx UK and Redundancy

The first time that I was made redundant was on 30^th June 2000 after ten years working in the waste management business.  A year or two earlier the company appointed a new boss and I’m not sure why but he took an instant dislike to me and he immediately started to make my life a misery.  He picked on me constantly, offered no support when I needed it and could barely disguise his hostility.

To be fair I didn’t care for him either, he was a twat, so it was completely unlikely that we would ever get on with each other.  He had a shrill high pitched voice, fierce halitosis that could strip paint and a hawk like face permanently etched with spite and nastiness and he barely had a civil word for me, or anyone else for that matter.  It is completely impossible to capture the unpleasantness of this man in just a couple of sentences but, take it from me, he was hateful and contemptible.

By 2000 he wanted rid of me and would go to any lengths to achieve it so in June while I was away on holiday in Cephalonia in Greece, he gathered together a bunch of ‘yes people’ – conspirators from amongst the Regional Managers and announced that due to poor performance (his own mainly) and the need to make efficiencies (to cover up for his incompetence) there would be some job cuts and one of us would have to go.  Of course it had already been decided by the back-stabbers that it would be me but he was obliged to apply the company redundancy policy and he was having some difficulty in squeezing my name to the top of the list because of the complicated points system that worked in my favour.

This wasn’t a surprise of course because there was some real dead wood in there especially his favourite who was the obvious candidate based on his appalling sickness record and his abysmal academic achievements (not even a cycling proficiency badge).   But I had decided that it was time to go anyway because what was the point in staying where you weren’t wanted so I waited until the last moment, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and he was so relieved he agreed to a generous pay off including the use of the expensive Vauxhall Omega company car for six months (with all my fuel provided, which was an unexpected bonus) and that was the end of my time in waste management in the private sector and I have never missed it for even a fleeting second.

I left the company at the end of June and for the first time in my life didn’t have a job so with with an unexpected lump of cash in the bank did the most sensible thing I could think of and rather than getting on looking for a new job went on holiday to Skiathos instead.

The list of back stabbers is:

Tom Riall

Colin Whitehead

Peter Clint

Elizabeth Pullen

Nick Patterson

Ray ? (HR Director)

Bob ? (Finance Director)

And Percy Powell (who gave his agreement and approval)

I know this is true because John Wheatley, who was at the meeting but excluded from the process, told me so!

Onyx UK and the Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

When I worked for Onyx UK in the waste management industry I was contract manager at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead and that meant collecting rubbish and picking up litter at posh places like Eton, Windsor town centre and Ascot.

Ascot of course has a race course and hosts one of the premier events of the racing calendar and with over three hundred thousand people turning up for the Royal meeting in June, mostly getting slaughtered and thoroughly misbehaving then although picking a winner might be down to chance the one thing for absolute certain was there would be an awful lot of clearing up to do afterwards.

In 1996, because public sector waste contracts were such a financial disaster, Onyx, to try and compensate, began an aggressive expansionist campaign in respect of commercial waste collections with a division of the company called Ipodec and a salesman called Richard was parachuted into Maidenhead to try and win lots of lovely new profitable business.

Richard did quite well at first as he took on the existing companies and slashed prices and pretty soon the money was rolling in but then the competitors who had been caught off guard by this new assault got their acts together and started to take the business back by further slashing prices to the bone and undercutting the new intruders.  The business model started to fail as revenues dropped and fixed costs remained stubbornly high and Richard needed new business.

At the Ascot racecourse there was a new manager called John Holdsworth who wanted to make changes and cut costs and one fateful day in the spring of 1996 Richard gave him a call and was invited along to talk about commercial waste collections.  At the subsequent meeting the issue was raised of clearing up after the race meetings and Richard sniffing more high profile business was soon hooked.

This is quite similar to what happened with compulsory competitive tendering actually and it turned out that John Holdsworth wasn’t too popular with the grounds staff who considered the overtime perk of clearing up as something quite important to their personal budgets and they didn’t want to see the job transferred to anyone else.  They completely misled John about the scale of the work and the resources required and he passed this duff information on to Richard.

Richard offered to collect all of the waste after every meeting and dispose of it, which wasn’t really a problem, but he also made an offer to clear up all of the grandstands, the paddock, the hospitality areas and the racetrack every night and that was to become a serious problem indeed.

Richard proposed to do this work with twelve men!

17^th June 1996 was much like any other day at the contract, it was the first week back after the annual Institute of Waste Management Conference piss-up in Torquay and everything was going pretty much to plan, the crews were finished for the day, the workshop was shutting up and I was thinking about going home when I received a phone call from Richard who was in complete mental melt down.  He was screaming down the phone and was almost incomprehensible as he tried to explain that there was so much litter and rubbish and that he was completely unable to cope.  I remember being a bit flippant and dismissively told him to give it another half an hour or so to see if things might improve. Five minutes later he phoned me back and now he was even worse so I thought I had better abandon plans for going home and drive over and see what all the fuss was about.

OMG! I had never seen anything like it!  I swear I have never ever seen so much rubbish in my life except on a landfill site.  I had no idea that the people who attend race meetings are such complete and utter pigs and who clearly thought that creating vast amounts of litter was just part of the day out!  They may consider themselves to be the cream of society but I have never witnessed such contempt for the environment or for the people who have to clear up after them. I really had seen nothing like it before and the whole of the site was ankle deep in rubbish!  I could immediately see why Richard and his twelve men would certainly not be able to get this place cleared up before the Queen was due back the next day.

John Holdsworth was going crazy, Richard was having a nervous breakdown, the litter pickers didn’t know where to start and the Ascot groundsmen were all falling about and laughing fit to burst!

It was about five o’clock so I had to make some urgent phone calls to the depot to get some more men and machines down to the site regardless of the cost and even this wasn’t enough so there were more urgent phone calls to other Onyx depots as far away as Brent in London and luckily everyone rallied around and by eight o’clock there were more men and machines than I thought it possible to mobilise at such short notice.  And not just Onyx personnel either because we had to use all of the recruitment staff companies in the surrounding area as they responded to the revenue earning opportunity and flooded the place with resources.

We didn’t get finished until well after midnight and at one o’clock we completed a final inspection and then sat down, completely worn out and enjoyed one of the best beers ever under the stars.

Onyx were good at cock-ups and this was one of the worst, it was going to be a financial disaster and poor old Richard never really recovered from the shock of it all.  He left the company soon after following another tendering disaster when Ipodec won a contract with Qatar Airways at Heathrow Airport to dispose of their commercial waste.  Richard and his boss gave them a good price with plenty of profit for the Company but unfortunately they hadn’t realised that food waste from the Middle East was considered special waste in the UK and it cost more to dispose of it than they had negotiated in collection charges. Whoops!

Back to Ascot and the real problem was of course that the Royal meeting goes on for five days so we couldn’t relax for long because sometime between now and five o’clock the next day we had to make some plans to make sure the same thing didn’t happen again tomorrow…

More tales to come!

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

First Weekend as a Refuse Collection Contract Manager

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

First Weekend as a Refuse Collection Contract Manager

“Her legacy is public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed that together shackle the human spirit”                                                                            Guardian Newspaper on Margaret Thatcher

In the couple of weeks in between accepting the job as Contract Manager at Gedling in November 1989 and the contract actually starting there was a lot to do organising the work.  Martin Edwards, the contract Supervisor and Vic Stanfield, the foreman, had already done a lot of this work, reorganising the collection rounds and putting the three man crews together to take into account the reduction in vehicles and manpower that came as an inevitable consequence of being privatised.

We didn’t realise this at the time but as it turned out this was most unusual because normal practice was for the new management team to wait until the very last moment to begin to think about important things like actually getting the work done while they concentrated on totally peripheral matters.

We finished with Gedling Borough Council on Friday 30^th November which gave the team a few days to put the finishing touches in place before the contract started a week later.  In this time the office inside the vehicle workshop was constructed and furnished with brand new office desks and filing cabinets, shiny Sasco wall charts and a microwave oven.  One whole day was wasted when we all drove down to Southend-on-Sea to collect our new Peugeot company cars and then went to Charlton in East London to meet the Head Office team.

The Managing Director and the Operations Director, Blunders and Blodger, came to the depot the weekend before the first Monday morning and contributed nothing more useful than cleaning out the vehicle cabs and putting the company logo on the side of the trucks.

They also brought the operations assistant Jane Brennan with them and she very helpfully went shopping for an office waste bin and a washing up bowl.  This was considered to be a very important job because it was essential to make sure every depot had the same office furniture in the correct corporate colours of blue and green and this was a job that was considered to be far too demanding for us.  It didn’t occur to them to bring along any clever work schedules because anything as complicated as that which required cerebral activity was completely beyond them both.

The weather was awful and snow and ice began to pile up outside in the depot yard and each vehicle was covered in several inches as it stood outside the workshop garages growing icicles and waiting in turn for a superficial makeover.  The weather was so bad that there was a power cut at my home in Derbyshire which lasted all weekend so I was actually rather glad to be at work in the warm workshops and offices but by Sunday teatime the novelty was wearing off and I was tired of vacuuming vehicle cabs and scraping off Gedling Borough Council stickers, my hands and feet were cold and I was beginning to wonder what I had let myself in for.  Blunders and Bodger just squabbled with each other all the time about the correct placement of the Cory Environmental logos on the sides of the dustcarts and the weekend just slipped away without anything really useful being done.

At some point on the Sunday the two company bully boys, Mike Mara and Jim Pitt turned up and I stupidly thought they would have something useful to offer but of course they didn’t and they just hung around the new office drinking tea and coffee and making the place look untidy.

Martin and I were really fed up by now but our spirits were lifted when at about six o’clock Bodger said that it might be a good idea if the two of us left off from vehicle scrubbing duties and went to the office to prepare for tomorrow morning and the first day of the contract.  These two chumps actually seemed to believe that we had spent the last four weeks doing nothing and that we should now take an hour or so to organise the collection rounds.  We didn’t say anything of course but we had got everything perfectly organised, Martin was very good at designing work schedules and we were delighted to sit in the warm first floor offices with a hot cup of tea and look down into the workshop at these four charlies all working away in the cold until almost ten o’clock at night – Wankers!

The next morning we turned up for work at six o’clock to see Malk Rockley and the street cleaners out first and then an hour later the refuse collection crews.  Blunders and Bodger were there and Mike and Jim who were normally on these occasions required to go out and deal with any catastrophes were too but we had everything well organised and under control so by nine o’clock they belatedly declared themselves surplus to requirement and all went off in different directions up and down the A1 to drop in on another contract and make life uncomfortable for the managers with a bit of a kicking about poor financial and operational performance.  When we were certain that they were at a safe distance we sent out for some bacon rolls and we put our feet up waiting for the crews to finish their days work.

Unfortunately the weather just continued to deteriorate and get colder and colder.  Readers unfamiliar with Gedling Borough Council in Nottinghamshire are forgiven for not knowing the topography of the area but basically the district is split in two by a high ridge called Mapperley Top and because it was exceptionally cold at the top of the hill any dustcart attempting to cross it to get to the town of Carlton on the other side just had its bin collection mechanism freeze up and had to return to the depot to be defrosted.

Prospects looked bleak but then I had a brilliant idea – keep all the crews on the Arnold side of the ridge and collect all the refuse there in the morning and then after (if) it had warmed up send them all to Carlton in the afternoon.  Either by my sheer managerial brilliance or by an absolute meteorological fluke the plan worked perfectly, we collected all the refuse as planned (which was an unheard of success in the private sector waste management business), we were in the pub with a pint of beer by six o’clock and I was beginning to believe that this waste management business wasn’t nearly as difficult as I had imagined it might be.

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

Onyx UK and the Dog Poo Solution

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

A Life in a Year – 11th December, Refuse Collection Vehicles

In February 1997 my boss Percy telephoned me to tell me that he had heard of a new type of refuse collection vehicle with impressive labour saving innovations that offered huge operational savings and that he was interested in finding out more.  He asked me if I would be prepared to visit the factory where they were manufactured and give him my opinion.  To be honest I had very little interest in bin carts or how they are made but fortunately, before I could decline, he happened to mention that the factory was in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States of America and as quick as a flash my lack of interest transformed into complete and total enthusiasm.  Did I want to visit Phoenix to see some dustcarts?  You bet I did!

I couldn’t believe my luck and enjoyed four days in the United States where as well as having to visit the Heil refuse collection truck factory, which quite frankly was a bit of a bore, I also got to visit the Grand Canyon and enjoy some top class hospitality.  This was a really good trip and on reflection I decided that refuse vehicle manufacture was actually rather interesting after all.  We posted the report of our visit (missing out the drinking bits of course) and offered our availability for any similar official trips in the future. 

This was a good move because the following year I was sent to La Rochelle in France to look at Semat refuse trucks and later in the same year I went to Milan to see the Brivio factory.  It’s amazing how interesting refuse trucks can suddenly become when there is an all expenses overseas trip involved.  Later the Company set up a centralised purchasing unit under a greedy procurement manager who saved the best gigs for themselves and that was the end of the factory visits and the overseas travel but believe me I enjoyed it while it lasted.

The company never did buy a Heil sideloading refuse vehicle, they were absolutely useless for use in the United Kingdom, but I have to say that they were brilliant at hospitality.  Jack Allen folded and went out of business just a short while afterwards, which was a shame and the Heil Engineering Plant in Phoenix that had opened in 1990 was closed down in August 2003 and production was switched to Fort Payne in Alabama.

In June 1991 the company (Cory Environmental) made arrangements for all the managers to attend the conference and exhibition and we stayed at the Maycliffe Hotel in St Luke’s Road in Torquay.  I had already started to become accustomed to uncontrolled drinking bouts at the expense of the company whilst staying in hotels but the annual IWM conference was the equivalent of the FA Cup Final or the Eurovision Song Contest because at this event everyone went crazy.

Every June everyone in the waste management industry used to travel down to Paignton in Devon for the annual waste management conference and there were three nights of unlimited hospitality because all of the big supply companies were there and wanted to impress and sell and were prepared to pay for it.  The big event and the one everyone lusted to get a ticket for was the Dennis Eagle banquet because this promised good food and high class entertainment but there was also plenty of food and drink from their competitors Jack Allen and the street sweeping vehicle manufacturers Johnson and Scarab.  As well as the big events there were lots of fringe companies trying to impress, wheelie bin, plastic sacks, protective clothing and tyres and they all hospitality budgets that we were eager to help them spend.

All of that extravagance must have been a financial burden because as well as Jack Allen and Heil, Dennis Eagle went out of business on 11^th December 2006.

A Year in a Life – 13th October, Dustcarts in Phoenix Arizona

Before I moved to Lincolnshire I used to work for a French waste management company called Onyx UK that was attempting to take over refuse collection services in the UK and I worked at a depot in Maidenhead in Berkshire and managed the Windsor contract.   One day in October 1997 the Managing Director, a man called Percy Powell, telephoned me to tell me that he had heard of a new type of refuse collection vehicle with impressive labour saving innovations that offered potentially huge operational efficiencies and that he was interested in finding out more.  He asked me if I would be prepared to visit the factory where they were manufactured and give him my opinion.  To be honest I had very little interest in bincarts or how they are made but fortunately, before I could prematurely decline, he happened to mention that the factory was in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States of America and almost instantaneously my lack of interest transformed into complete and total enthusiasm.  Did I want to visit Phoenix to see some dustcarts?  You bet I did!

And so a couple of weeks later on a miserable wet autumn day I drove to Heathrow Airport and met my travelling companions in the departure lounge; Dave who worked for the company and who, despite having no real technical background or training, had managed to convince everyone that he was an expert on vehicles and procurement, Keith who was a contract manager from Norwich and who was just as mystified as I was why he had the good fortune to be selected for this task, but like me wasn’t complaining, and then there was Allan and Ben who worked for the vehicle manufactures Jack Allen and who hoped to interest us in their exciting new dustcart range.

It was a long flight with North West Airlines but there was free drink and hot food and we made each other laugh while we misbehaved like excitable little boys going to summer camp and the first leg of the journey passed surprisingly quickly and after eight hours we landed in Dallas, Texas to make our connecting flight to Phoenix.  This involved a tedious four hour wait hanging around the shopping malls and the book shops which was excruciatingly dull, but we also spent some time, well, most of it actually, in the airport bar which was a much better alternative and it gave Dave the opportunity to begin his quest to spend Allan’s entire years hospitality budget in just three days.  Dave it seemed had a gluttonous appetite for beer and burgers and it started right here in Dallas.

Finally we made the second leg of our journey to Phoenix, or to be strictly accurate, Scottsdale, and once successfully through passport control and the typically unfriendly US customs we picked up the people carrier hire vehicle and made the short journey to the motel where we had reservations courtesy of Jack Allen.  We had been travelling for sixteen hours and Allan, Ben and Keith all declared themselves weary and ready for bed but Dave wasn’t finished just yet and he coerced me into going to the bar for last drinks and a final burger.  The term ‘last drinks’ usually implies a quick twenty minute round up but once Dave had got the taste for the beer, Allan’s room number for charging it to and fallen in love with the attractive girl behind the bar we stayed for a good long session until, way past reasonable closing time, she  finally ran out of patience and decided to call time!

My travelling companions…

 

These are the full Waste Management chronicles:

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

The Tendering process

Disorganising the Work

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Inappropriate Visit to The Moulin Rouge

The Royal Ascot Clear Up Fiasco

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

A Life in a Year – 6th October, An Inappropriate Visit To The Moulin Rouge

Between 1995 and 2000 I worked for a French company called Onyx UK and they used to take us away frequently and we stayed in expensive hotels and hung out in bars and nice restaurants but what was best was that once a year we all assembled at Waterloo station and they put us on Eurostar train and took us through the tunnel to Paris for an annual conference. 

One year when they were really showing off after buying out a competitor they took us to the Moulin Rouge for a special treat and we had champagne to drink and watched pretty ladies dancing on stage.  Although they would have negotiated a group discount on account of there being about eighty of us someone told me later that this demonstration of extravagant folly cost the company over £8,000 which was about the equivalent of the annual salary of one of the street cleaners that it employed.  To his credit my friend Mike Jarvis refused to go because he didn’t consider it appropriate to accompany female colleagues to what he described as a strip-club but I did not share his lofty moral objections, declared it to be an up-market strip club and happily accepted my ticket for the meal and the show.

The Moulin Rouge opened on 6^th October 1889 in a building at the foot of the Montmartre hill. Its creators were savvy businessmen who understood perfectly what Parisian society wanted and they created a nightclub to allow the very rich to go legitimately to the fashionable but seedy district of Montmartre where they could demonstrate egalitarian virtues and mix with workers, artists, prostitutes, the middle classes, businessmen, elegant women and foreigners visiting Paris.

By day the exterior of the Moulin Rouge is rather disappointing and the red windmill looks ridiculous and out of place on this Paris Boulevard but by night it is something completely different with glitzy lights, the whiff of gauloise on the evening air and a sense of anticipation as people turn up for the show. We arrived in two buses and were ushered through the lines of people waiting behind barriers who would gladly buy our tickets from us if we were prepared to sell and past ladies of dubious employment who would gladly accompany anyone who had a spare.

Walking along the corridor and through the doors into the interior was an awesome experience, like stepping back to Belle Époque (French for Beautiful Era) turn of the century Paris into a room decorated in lavish red with rows of table lamps flickering like glow worms and columns adorned with Toulouse Lautrec posters and other appropriate memorabilia.  My first open–mouthed impression was that this was a magnificent venue with authentic mural paintings and columns with the original posters of the big name stars that have appeared here, somewhere that epitomised the golden age of peace, extravagance and optimism that was perfectly captured here in a sort of time capsule.  It isn’t especially big inside which gives it an intimate ambiance and this was emphasised when we squeezed into out allotted tables about half way back from the stage in between two rows of decorative gold fences that separated the eight hundred and fifty diners into convenient corrals for the waiters to serve tables.

The Galop from Jacques Offenbach’s ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’ is the tune most associated with the famous can-can dance which is a prominent feature of the entertainment and this played repeatedly in the background as the room began to fill and until the buzz of anticipation eventually drowned it out. Once everyone was in their seats the lights went down, the music exploded into the auditorium and the dancers in lavish costumes opened the two hour show with the iconic high kicking dance.  During the show there was an average three-course corporate entertainment meal and for our table of eight there was cheap champagne and a bottle of red and white wine which proved completely inadequate and was soon consumed.  We considered buying more but it was prohibitively expensive because the management doesn’t want tables full of boozed-up louts acting inappropriately, leering and wolf whistling at the girls on stage so we stayed dry for the second half of the show with the intention of making up for it later back at our hotel.

After the show the room emptied quickly as guests were efficiently whisked away to the street for waiting taxis and transportation.  Our coaches were there and took us directly back to the hotel where Mike was sitting in the bar and over a drink or two remained indignantly disinterested in out tales of the evening’s entertainment, he didn’t want to know about the mime artist or the acrobat who balanced on chairs and he especially didn’t want to know about the half clothed dancers and on reflection, although I enjoyed it, I have to say that I agree with him.

More tales of incompetence, waste and extravagance:

Cory Environmental, Blunders and Bodger

Cory Environmental at Southend on Sea

Onyx UK

An Unexpected Travel Opportunity

The Tendering process