A brief timeline of 83,000 years

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Hey, guess what? Robot trucks are coming to take your job. Yep. They’re gonna put a bunch of robot trucks on the pitted-out graveyard we call our interstate systems, so they can not only brake automatically every seventeen seconds, they can also sit in traffic for 728 million hours a year. Bread should only cost about $11,000 a loaf by the time it gets to the shelves.

Our friends over at ATRI have calculated a trucking industry waste of time in what amounts to 83,000 years a year, sitting in traffic alone. Let’s take a chance on disrupting the space-time continuum, and just cruise through what’s happened in the past 83,000 years, while we were sitting in traffic last year. If your head hurts, it’s probably because you’re sane.

Og leaves instructions to take the loop, but unfortunately they’re misinterpreted.Og leaves instructions to take the loop, but unfortunately they’re misinterpreted.

According to a summary of text from “People of Earth: An Introduction to Prehistory,” there was a movement of homo sapiens from tropical Africa that began the spread of modern humans throughout the world. It’s disputed as to whether or not this happened 70,000 or 85,000 years ago, so 83,000 is a reasonable number of years to hypothesize.

We literally sat in traffic for what equates to the dawn of civilization last year. In 83,000 years, mankind has roamed, camped, hunted, farmed, conquered and destroyed most of the Earth. Pretty much everything that we know, except for the construction on I-75 through Cincinnati, Ohio, has been accomplished, reinvented, and accomplished again. Empires have risen and fallen while you’re getting the finger on the loop around Atlanta for having the nerve to obey the lane restrictions.

This is a perfect example of why the trucking industry is phenomenal. Bear with me. I will reveal the twisted thinking after I take a brief moment to remind you that you don’t pay $11,000 for a loaf of bread that’s not baked anywhere near where you buy it, and the trucker that delivered it participated in a time vacuum of epic proportions to get it to you.

Even with the flagrant waste and time inefficiency that plagues this industry, it is still able to ship goods at incredibly low prices. Can you imagine the profit margin if just one grocery warehouse was to actually run their loading and unloading on time? (Stop laughing, your face is gonna stick like that.) Can you imagine the hours that could be used efficiently and traffic that could be avoided if there were no lane restrictions, or if we actually had dedicated lanes for trucks only? (I’m not kidding, your face really will stick like that.)

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I realize the cumulative hours that equate to 83,000 years don’t actually represent 83,000 years, but I can’t help but think these posts are cave paintings for the truckers sitting in traffic right now. When they read them next year, after civilization has gone through another cycle. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a tear in the fabric of the universe to consider. Keep on truckin.