A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 14 – My Career Epiphany
My first comprehensive epiphany was about improving millions of lives, but almost nobody was interested.
As I look back at my life, I was on the path to a comprehensive perspective from the time I could walk. Before I began writing essays in 1996, I had the peak comprehensive moment of my career, but I was too far ahead of my time, even today. It happened when I was the controller of a trucking company. Trucking was a gritty, primitive business for a few reasons, and transportation was dealing with deregulation, which Jimmy Carter initiated. Trucking companies that did not modernize would eventually go out of business. When I started there in 1991, a third of the USA’s trucking companies had gone out of business in the previous decade.
My company was one of the upstarts, as the barriers to entry were largely gone, and our fleet of over 400 trucks was all owner-operators when I began there. After a few years, we leased trucks and trailers and hired drivers. We were a flatbed operation. Before I arrived, the company never had a competent controller, and it was part of a conglomerate of several trucking companies whose parent company was publicly held.
I immediately began digging into the business and the accounting systems. Mountains of paper moved around the office, and we had brute-force methods of compliance, as people did data entry all day long but the results were error-ridden. I designed a system for recording miles in which we had one data entry position and an analyst position, and let the software do the rest, instead of having several data entry positions. It took our error rate from 10% to 1% and eliminated the vast amounts that we paid in audits by the states, for their road and fuel taxes. That was typical of my innovations, which I worked closely with the programmers on.
I was not allowed, initially, to look into the many piles of paper that moved through the office, especially the safety department, in which clerks looked for what is called log falsification, as they drove more hours than they legally could, but created false logs to hide it. That was because drivers were paid by the mile. That pay practice encouraged them to drive more hours than they legally could, and the USA’s highways were filled with fatigued drivers who drove more than the legal limit. Every year that I was there, our trucks were involved in fatal accidents, and driver fatigue was a key reason for it.
Truck drivers faced a dilemma. They could drive locally, be home every night, but make about $8-to-$10 per hour. Or, they could live in their trucks as over-the-road drivers, get home every few weeks, and make about 50% more. I heard it called combat pay. I saw drivers who drove over-the-road, but their marriages suffered, so they got a local job, but could not make ends meet, and came back to work for us. When we hired drivers as employees (we got up to 200 employee drivers), two-thirds of them had their paychecks garnished for child support. Few over-the-road drivers could make their marriages work, as they were gone nearly all of the time. It was the land-based version of a sailor’s life. It was a miserable existence.
When I was there, trucking companies began putting satellite dishes on their trucks, to communicate with them and keep track of them. Theft of trucks and their loads was an industry-wide problem, and driving a truck was such a miserable job that there was a criminal element in the driver population that would steal trucks, trailers, loads, and fuel. They were rarely prosecuted (although I tried to), but moved on to another company after they were caught. It was really crazy.
When I had been there for three years, the parent company decided to upgrade our computer system, which had been heavily modified. That conversion burned me out, as it took a year for us to recover what we lost in the conversion. Nearly my entire career was 50-to-60 hour weeks, which was normal. Few such accountants lived to be 70 years old, and I saw that plenty in my career. After nearly five years there, I was burned out, for the fourth stress burnout of my career, and I would have two more ahead of me.
But I was finally allowed to look into the safety area, and while talking with an assistant, it hit me that we could eliminate all of the piles of paper moving around the office. We would enter the key information from the documents once and the system would do the rest. Today it is called taking the back office paperless, and it has been all the rage in corporate America for the past 10-to-15 years, but in 1996, hardly anybody understood what I was talking about. I presented the idea to my president and our CFO at the parent company, and they did not understand. The benefits would have been vast, including making our operation much more efficient and profitable, which is the Holy Grail of capitalism. Not only that, it would eliminate brute-force jobs in the office. Not only did they not allow me to do it (and it would not have been much of a technical feat), that president ran the company into the ground after I left, stopped doing the important accounting, which led to an accounting scandal several years later, which took down the entire conglomerate, and many lives were ruined in the collapse. I read about those ruined lives for years afterward.
But in the same moment that I had my epiphany for going paperless, I saw how to easily eliminate the situation of people who live in their trucks, and there were more than a million of them in the USA. It would have been technically easy to coordinate trucks and loads so that every truck driver could be home each night. But I found that capitalism does not value the people who slave away for the profits. Nobody wanted the system to change, especially the drivers. When I brought up the idea to over-the-road drivers, their first reaction was that they would no longer get combat pay. When I brought up the idea to a trucking executive years later, the response was the same. Those drivers had to give up their lives for the combat pay, and nobody wanted it to change, even though there was no need for the “war.”
A decade after I got my idea, I interacted with Richard Stallman for a month in the summer of 2006. Stallman is the father of the free software movement, and companies such as Wikipedia owe their existence to people such as Stallman. A pupil had badgered me for years to ally with the free software movement for making free energy happen. They did seem like natural allies, but that was a frustrating month. Stallman was what I call a classic Level 3. Stallman’s IQ is off the scale, but his objections were that free energy would upend the “laws of physics,” the idea of organized suppression was a “conspiracy theory,” and the “left” dismisses any and all conspiracy theories. After a month of beating my head against the wall, I stopped trying with Stallman and wrote an open letter to the free software movement, for which I have never received a reply. But on his own initiative, Stallman began reading my essays and stumbled into my trucking essay. He advised me to take my idea to Europe, where the “social organization” was more amenable to my idea. I have watched programmers and mathematicians marvel over my idea, but it was never going to go anywhere in our nation, which is happy to grind truck drivers into a pulp. The drivers not only do not cooperate, but they even defend against “threats” such as my idea. If they had organized, all would have been well.
When I have written that people are addicted to scarcity, that situation is one of many that informed my views. Several years ago, I read a book with a chapter on the state of truck drivers in the food industry, and the situation has even gotten worse. It has been very painful to witness that, when I know how unnecessary it is.
But, as I look back, it is easy to see how I was forming my comprehensive views at that trucking company. Around 2010, after seven years, I was finally allowed to initiate going paperless in the back office of a software company, of all things. As I watch today’s AI frenzy in high-tech, I still shake my head over how humanity’s permanent energy solution is ignored by all sides. From where I sit, it is surreal and it could spell our doom. How about this instead?