How retail has yet again saved my bacon
A blog from the Brecon Beacons
"I am sitting on a camping chair next to my van Bimble all alone in a field in the Brecon Beacons with Lily, one of my trusty 4-legged adventure companions, listening to nature do its thing. A Woodpecker is making a new home in a beautiful oak tree to my left, ahead of me cattle are mooing and sheep are bleating in the fields and on the hill side and to my right are Fan y Big, Cribyn and Pen y Fan, a trio of majestic mountain tops within my view. Not bad for a Wednesday lunchtime and my mid-point of a few days of much needed R&R. Walking, resting, eating, sleeping and sitting in a freezing cold Welsh mountain stream until my toes go numb.
I, like many others around the world, was meant to be somewhere else, namely Tanzania and Zanzibar. As an Expedition Leader I would have one Kilimanjaro with 360 Expeditions already under my belt this month and should now have been on R&R, my first ‘proper holiday’ in 12 years, learning to dive in the crystal clear waters of Zanzibar before heading back to lead another expedition on Kilimanjaro, this time with Adventurous Ewe, which would have been my 36th expedition to this magnificent mountain since I first stepped foot on Kilimanjaro for work in 2008, but numbers or ‘supposed to be's’ don’t really matter a jot at the moment. Keeping myself and those around me safe and well are my priorities right now and I’m doing the best kind of self-isolating alone in this blissfully quiet camping field.
Back in March I was a ¼ of the way through another very exciting year with plenty of The Duke of Edinburgh's Award expeditions in the UK and many a high mountain to climb abroad with clients eager for a taste of a less oxygenated adventure then, as of 23rd March, I became an employee of Tesco. An abrupt halt to all of my outdoor and public speaking work ensued with email after email beginning ‘Sorry Jo but this one has been pushed back / cancelled / rescheduled’ from the wonderful companies I freelance for and I began what has proved to be many more months of delivering groceries than I initially thought.
Retail had already saved me back in 1993 when I gave up a life with horses and simply needed to find a job that paid my bills. I happened upon an advert in the local paper, The Bucks Herald, for sales assistance at a new department store which was due to open the following month. Having had no indoor, retail or customer facing experience I thought ‘what have I got to lose’ and applied. To my amazement they gave me an interview and I was subsequently taken on to work within the Stationary Department under the wings of a force of nature, Ruth, who was to become my greatest friend since then.
I felt like a fish out of water. I had never worked indoors, never had to wear a skirt for work or proper shoes, I didn’t see daylight all day, there was no fresh air and every day was a school day with learning new and unfamiliar things. I stuck at it and after a year was promoted to Assistant Department Manager on Handbags and Fashion Accessories and after another year, I left to take on the High Wycombe branch of The Early Learning Centre as Store Manager. I was chuffed with my progress and worked my socks off but I was restless and knew that I wanted to try other things.
Over the next decade or so I had a brief stint back with horses in America, a role as Business Advertising Executive with The Bucks Herald for a couple of years, a move into Management within a global electronics corporate for 5 years and then onto Business Advisor then Partnership Manager within Business Link for another 5, all the while feeling like none of it really fitted. I worked hard as always, steadily worked my way up through the management ladder which allowed me to work my way up through the property ladder too and I bought the fancy car, but I still felt like something was missing both in my career and life.
That’s when I found adventure and a whole new way of life which has kept me busy with exciting projects and work for the last 12 years. For the purposes of this blog, that’s a whole other story.
Back to 23rd March 2020 and the day I unlocked the retail box in my brain and got back to the coal face. I had applied for 2 roles at my local Tesco Extra in Salisbury the week before, one driving and one on check out and once again, was fortunate to get in early just before many more applied. I went in for a quick interview with the Shop Floor Manager who started me on the check out at 6am that Monday. Mum picked up the dogs on Mother’s Day and neither of us knew when we would see each other next, or when I would be able to have my beloved dogs back.
Being very much an outdoor person these days, swiping left for 8 hours a day sitting on my backside behind the checkout and away from fresh air was not my idea of an ideal job but I am adept at turning my hand to most things and retail started to save my bacon once again. Within a week I had been poached by the Dotcom department, and as week 2 with Tesco began I moved from the tills to driving one of Salisbury’s 20 Tesco vans and delivery 1 ½ tonnes or more of groceries per 10 hour shift.
In my mind I was simply on luggage truck duty, as per my days crewing or leading London to Paris trips with adventure company Discover Adventure. Rather than dropping off luggage at a variety of hard to get to hotels en route to Paris or farther on, I was dropping off supplies to customers who could not or did not want to go out. Most households were easy to find but many were not, and Apple maps became my friend as I delivered to places in Wiltshire and Dorset that I never knew existed.
I had thought I would be in the job for a couple of months then take a month off before heading back to my normal work mid-summer however with overseas expeditions still a no go and DofE not quite starting back yet I stayed on until mid-August.
To start with I was tired all of the time. A total shift in work both physically and mentally, and a different set of challenges to get my already overstretched brain around threw me for six. I worked, came home, ate, slept and then repeated the process. I was not used to such a routine way of life having lived a very transient existence for so long but gradually my body and brain adjusted, I stopped being ‘one of the newbies’, started getting to know some of the guys and gals I worked with regularly and settled into my new normal.
I have met some truly wonderful customers over the last 5 ½ month from a 99-year-old gentleman who was still living independently to many a cuddly dog. Yes, I have been grumped at by a few customers when their bananas were not ripe enough or the salmon they had ordered was out of stock but I was in no place to utter ‘first world problems’ and simply did my best to empathise under the circumstances. I had some great chats with people living on their own and we were the only socially distanced face to face contact they had week in week out, I talked to many a youngster about their home schooling and what they were going to nick name the wood lice they were keeping as pets. I witnessed utterly beautiful sunsets, got soaked in the rain and cooked in the heat but for those 5 ½ months, without a doubt, Tesco 100% saved me mentally and financially enough to cover my bills.
I’ve been surprised by some people’s reactions to me doing the job, in good ways and bad. Some have said what a gallant job we are doing, putting ourselves out there when so many have to stay home. Who’d have thought that the much-maligned delivery driver would become a much-respected key worker and someone most people wholeheartedly relied on. I have also had people look at me as if to say ‘oh poor you’ for having to take on such a role or or ‘I would never do that job’ and I politely put them right straight. This is no dead-end job (and there’s another blog about that coming soon too), but a job to be proud of. I work with some truly fantastic individuals from all walks of life in an often highly pressurised environment. Things do sometimes go wrong, that is life, no business is perfect. However we do our very best during each part of the process to get that delivery to you on time and with whatever you have ordered within those green or blue crates. Many Dotcom customers have a ‘humorous substitution story’ and I’ve been on the sharp end of some too.
I’m now a month into a 3 ½ month period of unpaid leave in order to get back to some of the work which has been my life, joy and passion for the last decade. I have been back instructing DofE students with Adtrex over the last month and I feel like I have rediscovered the love for a job that I already cherished so much, as well as taking time to get cracking on projects at home which I’ve only been able to scratch the surface with when I’ve been here, there and everywhere.
I’ll be back behind the wheel of a Tesco delivery van come 1st December and will continue to do so until I need to take another period of unpaid leave in order to get back to my #1 job but in the meantime, I am relishing every part of being the outdoor me again.
