Safar Protection Blog » Professional Drivers Part II:

Professional Drivers Part II:

September 2, 2010

Adding on to Damon’s blog “Driving O/S”, concerning the need to have the right driver for your client; I have, yet again, experienced things that could go wrong when not having a professional driver. Once again, this was the result of promoters trying to give us a cheaper option by using anyone with a driver’s license to drive for protected clients. We can not stress how important it is to have trained and experienced drivers to work with.

Our first driver incident on this particular assignment, started with calling our driver two times to confirm he knew where our location was in addition to the loading dock where the client would be dropped off. Both times he was adamant that he knew where he was going. Well, 15 minutes after the expected arrival time we received a phone call from the driver and once determining where he was, we found out he had driven 20 minutes past our location. By this time our 500 strong crowd that had already been waiting for an hour was starting to get agitated.

Around 20 minutes later when they arrived into the car park of the shopping centre, I received another call saying he could not find the loading dock. At the same time, I could hear the clients in the background screaming at the driver. 10 minutes after explaining this to him, he found our destination. The driver was immediately replaced.

On the next day in a new city, we were looking forward to a trouble free day. My first job for the day was to contact our driver to confirm he knew my exact location. However, to my surprise, our driver’s flat-mate answered the phone saying he had left it at home. So our driver did not have a phone on him today. This news gave me an instant headache! On top of this issue, we had to deal with the venue Security manager trying to change our staging location of our vehicle with no experience to do so. After calling the clients PA, we managed to direct the driver to the correct location without to much trouble.

Two hours later, just before our client’s departure, I went to check on our vehicle. I found out that our driver has just learned the hard way the reason why you do not run your radio nonstop on ACC, when the vehicle did not start.