Heavy Goods Recruitment, Behind Closed Doors.

For along time while I worked as a silver service waitress the business men who teased showing no mercy to, used to say that I was far brighter and should be doing more with my life. Due to a motorcycle accident I was unable to work as a waitress so did temp receptionist work which I enjoyed while on one assignment I ended up assisting the M.D. and Personal Manager as they were short staffed.

Though that a assignment in 1987 I met the man who became my long term partner. He was a transport manager and the first weekend away we spent together we worked on a report on refrigerated vehicles, not romantic but I found it very interesting.    

Though that a assignment in 1987 I met the man who became my long term partner. He was a transport manager and the first weekend away we spent together we worked on a report on refrigerated vehicles, not romantic but I found it very interesting.    

I moved into a filthy room which I spent to whole weekend cleaning and started at my new job in central Cardiff the following Monday.

The manager was vile in every way you can image. His mouth was fowl and his head was very twisted. He made it quite clear he didn’t want me working their but the  Director had and I wasn’t his choice.

He put me on call the first weekend, I new nothing about the companies we were doing business with or what the driver requirements were. I got into a mess on the Saturday night and phoned his house to ask for help. The following Monday morning before I was threw the office door I was met by this fat egg shaped man on little legs screaming every expletive under the sun. This became an everyday assurance.

I had only been their a few weeks when a man came in looking for work. The manager interviewed him and said he would be in touch with run details. I looked up from my desk after the man had left, quite shocked and said. “Your not going to employ him!” The manager said. “ Yes what’s your problem with him?” I replied. “ It was obvious he was drunk!” The manager said what he did in his own time was up to him and to mind my f…king business.

Lunchtime two days latter, my manager took a phone call, turned very pale stood up put his jacket on and said he was off down the pub and I could hold the fort. Within ten minutes for him leaving the phone rang. It was the director of a lorry hire company, he was so angry it took me a while to calm him down. It turned out that one of our driving had driven under a bridge which the trailer was to high for and ripped the top off. The driver had continued to drive in the poring
rain to the designated drop point, all of the furniture inside, had been  was ruined and people at the drop refused to take delivery. So the driver opened the backdoor pulled away at speed leaving the furniture smashed across the forecourt.

Then the phone rang again this time the director of the furniture company who had employed the virile hire company to move the furniture.

Again the phone rang and our drunk driver who my manager employed had been booked on a double night out run. He had taken the sixty pounds night out money gone straight to the pub drank the lot. Then got into the lorry hit and written off six cars before burring the lorry into a brick wall.





Intermittently over the first two months I worked at the office a couple of warehouse people had been phoning saying they were owned wages and the manager always told them where to go.



One day one rang up while I was “holding the fort” and as it was quiet I took the details and went and looked it up. A lot of people in this time didn’t have bank accounts so they would arrange for us to cash their money and they would collect it from the office and sign in a book of computer printouts.



I looked threw the book at the dates he gave me, going back before and it screamed out to me I could see the man’s signature had been forged. The manager and the previous consultant  had been taking wages from temps for months.


I phoned the Director who employed me and he said that was why they had put me their to smoke out what was going on.

The manager was promoted to their head office where they could keep an eye on him as they said he was a good consultant and they let me go as I’d done what needed to be done.

I had already been approached by another company so I went to work for them, having to relocate back to Bristol. I did telesales for a couple of months and then walked in the office one morning to be told that the manager had left and I was the new manager.

I didn’t feel I was knowledgeable enough to run a division of heavy goods drivers so I went to the department of transport who had an office in Bristol and asked him to teach me the rules and regulations of driving which they did. They also taught me to read tachographs.

The office was very badly managed so I set about putting it straight. I phoned every driver and asked them to come in and re-register and to bring their licences in for me to copy to keep on record. I was met with major abuse, who did I think I was, and f….ing woman, they had worked for the company for years. My reply was quiet and calm, I was the new manager and they would do as I asked or I’d sake them. I sacked the all bar two as I new that most of them had be disqualified for driving threw drink and drugs. I ordered over two hundred P45.

I also went threw all of the contracts we had with existing companies and went to the depo’s and updated them.

Then I was summed to the Safeway distribution outlet where the director asked me if I could proved him with nine drivers a day. I said yes knowing I had only two.
On the way back from the meeting, in the back of the car, in twenty minutes, I wrote an advertising campaign. I new I had to get drivers but also the company I worked for had a terrible reputation so I put under new management on the adverts.

I interviewed a hundred drivers the following week and took on two.
As they came threw the office door see me in a suit and thinking I new nothing. So my opener was, “Take my threw the hooking up procedure, then I’d ask about lorry checks, loaded of the vehicles, weight distribution. By the time we talked about splitter gearboxes they realised I new what I was talking about.

The drivers came via recommendation and the business grew by word of mouth. As I took on more drivers so I would go out and get more business by the time I left nine months latter I had over two hundred men working for me.

Unlike most other agency people I worked differently. A lot of agencies mess people around just giving them a couple of days then taking on more people and leaving the original people twisting in the breeze not knowing if they were employed by the agency or not. Where as when I took on people I built up their hours very quickly, until they were working full.

I never lied to a client, if all of my drivers were working, rest and not legal to drive I’d tell then to go to another agency, or that I would have a drive legal to driver in  four hours or so.

I checked my drivers’ tacho before passing them back to the companies as was legal requirement. My drivers new if I caught then speeding or not taking the legal breaks I’d sack them.
They also new I was psychic and would often tell them why they had rung me before they said, it kept them inline as they new if they did anything they shouldn’t I would now about it. As far as I was concerned all of my drivers were professionals and treated them with respect.

If a company complained about a driver and demanded them sacked I would refuse until I’d spoken to the driver. This only happened a few times and it turned out by checking the tachos that they had the wrong driver, so the drivers weren’t sacked. Unlike so many other agencies that would sack staff on a sneeze.

My introduction to Heavy Goods Recruitment was a nightmare. I
witness every law being broken by drivers and employers. It taught me how to do it properly with the help of the department of transport.
I also closed the original agencies office down in Bristol by taking all of their contracts. It was a fabulous time in my life (very long hours) and there is something about working in heavy goods that stays in your blood. Now I will point out to my daughter, a wagon and drag or notice to much weight over an axle of a trailer.

My long term partner died a few years ago but before he did the company he worked for grew and we’d travel around the country visiting the transport depo’s. He’d often drive Bristol to Cornwall in a day and working in distribution a local journey to me is some where you drive their and back in a day.

Life moves on but I consider myself blessed to have worked in distribution and met such great people.

Love to all jo x

The Black Dog

The black dog was a name I’d heard used to  describe depression mainly by people would had had addictive problems. 

So what is, the black dog? I would describe to as the most terrifying form of depression. One minute your fine, your having a laugh with a friend on the phone and feel totally normal. The next, the call ends and suddenly you drop into a bottomless pit. You feel like your on the top of a seventy floor build and the roof has just given way beneath your feet. Your falling threw the air, with bits of debreu fall around you. With no control of you body you drop powerlessly threw the air. You know that there is a floor below and you braise yourself as you know it’s going hurt when hit the floor below, but then it will be okay. Your body jolts for a split second as it hit’s the floor. Then the floor gives way. Each time you drop threw a floor you can feel your body gaining more and more speed and the pain intensifies. You feel you are going beyond the human capacity of pain and your lost in darkness.


As you drop threw the blackness and are lost to humanity. Your life feels empty and the pain in beyond measure. By the time you’ve gone threw the fiftieth floor there is no connection with anything as your sucked into the black abyss. The emotional pain is beyond measure and by this point you just want to kill yourself to end the pain.
It is often said that people who commit suicide are selfish. For those people who have black dog depression, they are beyond the comprehension of how others view them, how they impact on others lives. At this point everything is gone. You feel so empty that the thought that anyone would care about you is beyond belief. It feels like you, have been flatted by a steamroller at speed. Their is no time to think of others, as the darkness comes on you with such force and speed.

I can’t tell what can pull someone back from this. I don’t know if it’s luck or a split second sense of awareness that pulls the person back into this reality. All I can tell you for sure is when your in it, nothing or no one can say or do anything to reach you.

 

In the early eighties my introduction to counselling and therapy was with the Samaritans. I then became interested in clinical psychology, while studying sociology and then counselling.  

 

Over the last two years I’ve experienced the black dog personally so I have sat on both sides of the desk.

 

Depression is a deliberating illness, sometimes caused threw relationship, work, bullying, childhood trauma and or abuse, chemical s that cause reactions in the brain, or when something so horrific and unthinkable happened that brain can not cope and threw depression shuts down.

 

Although this was horrific, I found I couldn’t take prescribed drugs as the side effects were as debilitating as the attacks of the black dog. For most of the last two years I’ve been a wreck.

 

It has been the love and support of friends, quiet a lot of counselling and I have studied herbs to learn what will help me on a day to day basis.

 

Herbs are as powerful as any drug but side effects are positive, as herbs are able to work in more than one area of the body at any given time. Like anything, uses without proper supervision or understanding can be dangerous if the quantities are exceeded or their other medical conditions exist.  

 

It isn’t possible to treat yourself on your own, so please seek help from your Doctor, a herbalist and look for some good counsellors who specialist in this area of work.

 

I wish you well on your journey.

 

Love to all jo x  

  

 

What lies Below

It was a beautiful summers day as I hanging washing out the back. The birds where singing and the air was filled with the scent of flowers,when my neighbour came into the garden, we shared. I had just moved into the property and we hadn’t met before. I started to speak to her while I hang the last of the washing. She leaned against the redbrick wall of the house chatted in a very casual way, between puffs on  her cigarette.

She was younger than myself, as we joked her clear blue eyes sparkled and I warmed to her straight away. I asked her if she had any plans that afternoon and as she don’t. I invited her to come and have a cup of tea and sit in the sun on my balcony. As I had planed to sunbath and read that afternoon and I said she was welcome to join me.

After an hour or of general girlie chit chat about boyfriends and make up extra , I notice she was really hot in her long sleeved blouse. I reassured her that although we living in town, we weren’t over looked as this was the highest building around, as we were girlie she could take your top off  and get some sun to warm her body which was healthy.

She hesitated and then took her top of. My eyes fell on the white skin of her arms and on seeing the slash scares up her arms I said. “ You didn’t want to kill yourself ,this was a cry of help.”

Her eyes fixed on me and she fell silent, for what seemed like an eternity. Then her sparkly blue eyes filled with tears “ You’re the first person in my life to understand.” Her body seemed to go limp as she started to let go of years of pain.

She talked for over three hours. Telling about her childhood, her father left when she was little. Leaving her mother to raise three children of which she was the oldest.

It wasn’t long before he stepfather moved in and how much she hated Friday’s. He would sending her mother out on the game and when they got back from school he would sexually abuse her. Telling her that if she didn’t do as he said he would sexually abuse her younger sister and brother and then beat her mother.

Over the coming months she would regularly appear and we talked. After a while she started to see that life could be different. She’d come and hide with me as she didn’t always want to go shoplifting with her mother but didn‘t feel strong enough to tell her face to face.

We didn’t just talk about her past but talked in general about cooking and many other things. She stopped self harming, as the emptiness inside started to disappear. She began to understand herself and organise her feelings, gaining inner strength and develop a new identity.

Self harming isn’t about making yourself bleed, to the person trapped inside their body feeling frightened and unable to communicate when emptiness is so endless it’s away of reminding themselves that they are still alive and can feel.

These people, are our beautiful and fragile, who need our help to find their way home.

Love to all jo x  

Where Is God by Jo Cooke Clairvoyant

Sitting beside my daughter in hospital, I was so angry with God. Sitting in silence, but in my head I was screaming at God.

"I have done everything you asked me to do! You have asked me to walk into dangerous situations, to help people and I've done it without a second thought. I constantly given my time, energy and lost out financially doing the things you have asked me to do and I've never complained. In yet you put me in such a horrible situation, that no words can desbribe."

 

It took six months for me to understand that God hadn't done this to me but that I had chosen the expirience as I had many other expiriences that happened in my life. That I had chosen them before I was born as part of my spiritual path as that we can only grow threw experience.

 

God was in the support that came afterwards. The friends and many people who I didn't know. From Doctors to the lady on the checkout who didn't get angry when I took so long to opening my purse. As I found simple things so difficult to do. I was physically and emotionally broken, with no expectation of help or support but it came.

 

I believe that we can only grow from personal expirences in life. Everyone's life is different shaped by our enviroment, growing up in an urban or rural, hot or cold country, large or small family. The emotional well being of the people who touch our lives, such as family members. So it goes without saying that we will have different spiritual believes.

 

I have studied many relgions and found that the teaching all run parellels but it been how they have been interpreded that has caused the divisions in humanity.

 

Often I meet people who say that they don't believe in God. This is their chose and my spirituality has taught me to respect and support people at what ever point they are at, in their lives.

 

It is very possible you have learned a lesson I am yet to learn. Which means that know one has a greater value as we are all growing on our life path.

 

 Love to all jo xx 

www.jocookeclairvoyant.com 0800 195 0518