Don't panic

 I follow Truck and Driver on the twiiiteratta, just to keep in touch with my previous life. I used to buy all the truck magazines religiously, a habit which has been dropped by the wayside. Now I dip into a few online. 

Of course I am interested in the current so called crisis of fuel shortages, and watch with amusement the panic buying. This crisis was manufactured, as with every other crisis which kicks people's arses into action. Rumours spread like wildfire, a bit like Chinese Whispers. The trouble is that the clamour to get whatever there is a shortage of creates a tsunami of brain fogged individuals to follow each other like lemmings. This is what creates the shortage. People are so easily manipulated. 

The downside is that those who really need petrol and diesel, like the emergency services, health workers, key workers that keep the country and the economy moving, can't get it because the pumps are either blocked with two hour queues, or they have run dry completely. Tell someone there is a shortage of something and immediately everyone needs it. 

I had a little smile to myself when reading Truck and Driver tweeeets. Truck drivers are chipping in with their experiences. 

Car drivers blocking the lorry diesel pumps to fill up their cars. Oh dear. A pump designed to fill up a large HGV tank delivers the fuel at a much greater speed through a much wider nozzle. I can see some spillages.

Car drivers should not be filling from HGV pumps (maybe unless they can prove they are key workers?) during this nonsense. There's a safety issue here too, bet there's been a few folk covered in diesel

According to the AA, many more misfuel breakdowns are occurring because people are desperate to put anything in their tank. 

Report that the AA is inundated with misfuel breakdowns as people are just putting "any fuel" in out of desperation inc Adblue Folk have utterly lost the plot. Well, hope they started the engine and ran it, that'll keep them off the road for a while. 

Panicking people are screwing it for everybody. 

A tanker driver tells me this morning that now even they are struggling to get fuel. He said motorists are now queuing at HGV pumps, and he’s running low on diesel. Goes without saying that if even the tanker drivers can’t get fuel, we’re up the proverbial creek.

I didn't have any problems getting petrol while on holiday, and I used quite a lot for the 2,200 miles that I covered. No queue's no shortages. I did a late Aldi shop on Friday night, calling in at the nearby filling station at 10.15pm to fill up my quarter of a tank. Then it all kicked off. There is nowhere urgent that I have to go, so that will last me a few weeks. 

Notice a pattern here? Tell people that there isn't enough toilet paper and everyone wonders what they are going to wipe their arses with. Tell everyone that they won't be able to do anything or go anywhere without a health certificate and they will clamour to get jabbed. Ping everybody on their not so smart phones demanding that they isolate. Makes me wonder what the next scare tactic will be. 

Going to spend the rest of the day outside in the garden. More holiday pics later. Toodle pip.   ilona

Update.

A lot of lorry drivers are paid through an Umbrella Company, and not directly by the companies they work for. The biggest company, Giant Pay, has just reported that they have been the victim of a cyber attack, and that a lot of drivers have been left unpaid this month. A couple of notes from Sky News web site. There is a lot more going on behind the scenes here than we are being told. 

Rebecca Seeley Harris, a former adviser to the Office of Tax Simplification, told Sky News that the IR35 tax changes moved the responsibility for making tax assessments to the client, which drove a lot of employers to move their payroll to "umbrellas" such as Giant Pay.

Ms Seeley Harris, who is campaigning for the fair regulation of the umbrella industry - which sits between the contractor (the driver) and the client (for instance, Tesco) and invoices the client on the contractor's behalf - warns that it is largely unregulated at the moment.