Reading Between the Lines

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the King’s horses

And all the King’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again!

–Oddly appropriate English nursery rhyme

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. And the more likely they are to get picked up, like silly Humpty Dumpty, and get put back together again by all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, who nowadays are what passes for our federal government.

Trust me, I am a big fan of government action in time of crisis, be it at the local, state or federal level. And that being said, I must say I’ve been so mightily impressed by what Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson has been doing to keep the Wall Street collapse from taking down Main Street too– as it did back in ‘29– that it’s a real shame no one asked him to be on their presidential ticket!

So hats off to Hank and to the the Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders who have been working feverishly this week to get a bill together– and passed, always the tricky part– quickly even in the midst as luck would have it of a hotly contested Presidential race.

The goal of course is not to just calm the always jumpy nerves of investors– we are way beyond that now– but to actually restore trust in America’s financial markets before the whole wide world freaks out and follows the U.S. into a severe economic recesssion if not a depression.

The good news is that if the economic bailout (or “rescue” if you prefer to sugarcoat it) passes, we should escape going off the precipice by a hair’s breadth. No one likes the pricetag and many abhore this sort of governmental action philosophically but the consequences of not acting– swiftly and decisively– to end this crisis I think are barely comprehensible to any of us almost 80 years since the Crash.

I do hope when this is over that besides limiting the “golden parachutes” that CEO s of rescued firms would get, Secretary Paulson will require all of them to pass a test on just what caused the Great Depression. And I hope governmnet banking regulators will have to pass one on what their job entails: making sure the kind of financial shenanigans Wall Street engaged in this time around do not get repeated, 8 or 80 years from now.

The dire warnings are up that Ike, which is nothing less than a Texas-size hurricane, is now bearing down on Galveston. We hope it wil not be a catastrophic event when it reaches land and we hope and pray all our Penton Media colleagues based in the Houston area and their families and friends ride out the storm and/ or their evacuations entirely in safety.

According to the National Huricane Center, by this morning Ike was measuring more than 500 miles across and was rated a Category 2 Hurricane–meaning it was blowing 105 mph winds at its center as it headed across the Gulf to Galveston, where it is forecast to make landfall sometime between late today and dawn tomorrow.



Big red blob at lower left is Ike, literally the size of Texas itself

A mandatory evacuation has been ordered for Galveston and hurricane warnings are up for the 400-mile stretch of coastline from south of Corpus Christi to Morgan City, LA, reports The New York Times.

More then a million Texans have evacuated, according to ABCnews.com, but in Houston officials have not issued a mandatory evacuation order for the entire city. “The call was made in part due to the city’s nightmare evacuation of 2005 as Hurricane Rita bore down on the coast,” according to the online news report. “Traffic jams stretched hundreds of miles and people were stranded without food or gas for days on the impassable highways. More people died in the gridlock then in the storm itself. “

At this writing, there’s certainly no telling what havoc Ike will wreak but we at FleetOwner online will do our level best to keep readers informed of the storm’s impact on trucking.

I’d like to add that you may not be aware that you can now keep up with breaking Fleet Owner news posted online using Twitter (http://twitter.com/fleetowner).

If you‘re not familiar with Twitter, it‘s a micro-blogging site that both individuals and businesses are using to quickly dispense brief information about themselves or their organizations. Truck drivers are among those finding it useful because it lets them issue updates about their whereabouts and other info while on the road using just a cell phone or mobile device.



Twitter is another way you can let your fingers do the talking…

OK, let’s all keep our fingers crossed and clutch our rabbit paws as we knock on wood that this storm loses lots of steam before it blasts ashore hours from now.

“Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.”–John Gunther, journalist (1901-70)

Though my family and I were not directly affected by the terrorist attacks of 9-11-01, as a lifelong resident of the tri-state metropolitan New York City area, I can’t help even seven years on from that incomprehensibly tragic day from learning how it changed things forever for so many of my neighbors and, of course, for every American and, for that matter, every person of goodwill everywhere.

I was on vacation with my family on that infamous day. I was drinking a cup of coffee and watching the Today show on NBC when they reported an airplane had struck the World Trade Center and cut to a live feed of the Twin Towers. I am sure that many others watching TV that morning had the same reaction I did– it must have been a Cessna or other small plane that accidentally hit the building. With that thought, odd as it was, still rolling around in my head, the second plane– clearly an airliner– executed a sweeping turn before the eyes of millions and flew right into the other tower.

Reeling from that image, we didn’t know what to do other than to gather up our then pre-school age kids and hit the road. We drove around aimlessly and soon learned from the car radio that another plane had crashed– right into the ground– in the same state we were in, Pennsylvania.

We kept the radio on and turned the TV on when we could but nothing we heard made any sense of it at all. Two days later, we drove home to Connecticut and when we reached the stretch of the New Jersey Tunrpike (I-95) northbound that usually provides stunning views of the Manhattan skyline, we were shocked and shaken to see a massive plume of smoke rising up from where the towers had once so proudly stood.



Photo credit: “wallyg” on flickr.com

Seven years later, those memories have not dimmed. I can’t even imagine how vivid and painful they must be for those who lost loved ones so suddenly and so pointlessly that day. As so many in the media have put it, all the 9/11 victims– in Manhattan, at the Pentagon or onboard the hijacked planes– did was board a flight or, even more mundane, just showed up for work.

I could tell you the stories of acquintances of mine who lost family members that day or relate what happened to friends who were caught in the immediate aftermath on the streets of New York . But I feel to do so in this space without their permission would not be right.

Words can do so little but in honor of the 2,973 lives known to have been lost on 9-11-01, please consider these uplifting lines from Shakespeare…

When he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night,

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

In World War II slang (which for my money is among the most colorful to have had a lasting impact on the good old flexible English language), a “milk run” was a bombing mission flown in the skies of Europe that was routine and went well–that is no casualties were incurred, at least not by the U.S Army Air Forces aircrew.



A B17 bomber being loaded for what we hope was a real milk run,

somewhere in England circa 1943

In civilian parlance, “milk run” of course came to mean any venture that’s both easy to pull off and sure to deliver succesful results. When I read in The New York Times today that a “neighborhood” grocery store concept that FleetOwner happened to cover tangentally earlier this year has apparently caught fire among the big grocery chains, I couldn’t help but think this development should foster quite a few more milk runs by trucks… or will it?

The gist of the Times piece is that grocery retailers that have built many of the mega-supermarkets that are common now even in smaller towns and ‘burbs are now also starting to roll out smaller, more focused neighborhoodish stories in response to the growth in chains running smaller-scaled stores such as everyone’s favorite quirky retailer, Trader Joe’s, and the more standard-issue but spanking-new one one I wrote about, the Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market operation, launched in the U.S. by Tesco, a giant retailer based in Great Britain.



A typical Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market store,

somewhere in the Southwest circa 2008

After reading about this food fight, I couldn’t help but wonder if this new avenue for retailing groceries will lead to an increase in the number of trucks serving the grocery distribution arena or will it result in more but smaller trucks plying these routes, especially given that nothing sticks out in a “neighborhood” setting quite like a tractor-trailer.

Then, maybe because I am working on an article for our October print issue on how to use IT to reduce a fleet’s carbon footprint, I started to wonder whether running more trucks– even if they are smaller– could even hope to pass muster with the Green Forces that are now becoming so prevalent in the U.S. marketplace? In fact, the Fresh & Easy piece I penned detailed their effort to put a green trailer into service in their California distribution fleet.

Final (for now) thought on this: Maybe the more-but-smaller trucks approach will win out for these retailers. That is, if they choose to run delivery trucks powered by hybrid drives or other environmentally friendly powertrain solutions.

Time will tell about all that, but as a consumer I will admit I look forward right now to having a few more options beyond walking miles of aisles whenever all I need to do is make a milk run!