Injury time

AS I type this I have been struggling for more than a month with a very painful right shoulder injury. This is one of the things that keeps us self-employed folk awake at night – the possibility of picking up an injury which makes it impossible to keep working and earning. It couldn’t have happened at a worst time. I have a backlog of work stretching into the next millennium, and every time I manage to get one vehicle out of the door, two more turn up to take its place. Once you have been running a business like this for a while you start to build up a base of loyal customers. If Fred rings me up and says “I forgot my MOT is due next week, can you sort it for me? Oh and by the way, the rear crossmember needs doing and none of the lights work”, I cannot really tell him to come back in three months. There have been quite a few Freds lately and I just have to shuffle jobs around, dig deep and take a couple more heavy-duty painkillers.

In the end I put out a plea for help and almost immediately got a reply from Mark, who I have helped out with a few parts over the years. He was in a position to come and assist me two days a week for a while, and hopefully we should be able to get far enough into the backlog for me to be able to take a week off and rest properly. As one of my customers pointed out (not unkindly) I’m not a teenager any more, and I should perhaps slow down a little bit and stop clambering all over vehicles like a rather oily monkey, use cranes and trolleys rather than shifting big lumps of metal by hand, and generally start acting my age. It’s fair comment. I’m doing a lot of the same things I was doing 30 or more years ago, in the same way, and sooner or later something was bound to give.