Is this thing on?

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Testing … 1, 2 …Testing … 1, 2 …

Twenty million contains a whole lot of zeroes. Did you know if you lay 20 million one-dollar bills, end to end, it would blanket our backyard with one-dollar bills a foot and a half thick? This is probably a filthy lie, but we’re certainly open to having someone try it. For science and all.

So 20 million tweets and re-tweets to the Commander in Chief of Twitter have gone unanswered. Someone got in trouble for threatening bodily harm, but no one has gotten any correspondence from the actual @POTUS account. I got an Arkansas rep to talk about his hair, but even after hundreds of tweets, messages, emails, phone calls, smoke signals, pleas, vaguely disturbing thoughts, and a probable place on the “no fly” list, I still can’t get a guy we voted for twice to respond to me about the ELD mandate. It’s like we don’t exist. You know, kind of like every single day.

I try not to be bitter, but it’s difficult when I read the comments on mainstream news articles about the industry – by people who have absolutely no idea whatsoever about the supply chain methods utilized to provide them the iPhone they use to make their stupid comments like, “So what if there aren’t enough drivers? Put the stuff on trains.”

Holy crap, Einstein. Why didn’t we think of that? You must be the most extra of them all. We shall call you Brainy McBrain, and you can tell all the homeowners who don’t want truck stops anywhere near their entire cities that there will be multiple railroad tracks running 24/7 through them. You better get on it, son. Take a shotgun with ya, yer gonna need it.

It must be nice to be so simple. Honestly. I almost wish I didn’t know there weren’t weeks’ worth of stock in the “back” of grocery stores. People still think there’s “more in the store rooms” – they absolutely don’t get the spacial value dedicated in these vast grocery / clothing / jewelry / automotive / craft / pet food / furniture / you-name-it stores to consumer goods on display – they don’t have room to keep much of anything “stocked in the back.” What you see is a rotating mass of things brought by trucks, every single day of the week, to relatively small storage spaces that serve as a brief staging area for fluidly-moving stock.

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I realize I’m preaching to the choir here, so I’ll stop. I will mention that even choir members have friends and family who don’t sing, so passing information on to them like this is really important. I know a lot of people I have told had no idea how any of this works. You start telling people about JIT freight and the three-day rule and they start paying a little closer attention to those trucks.

We desperately need education in this country, about things that affect our everyday lives. We need a “Schoolhouse Rock” version of the supply chain. We need to have driver’s education specifically about sharing the roads with commercial vehicles, and we need people to understand that autonomous trucks are not going to magically solve all our freight problems. We’ve got to stop treating professional drivers like they don’t exist.

They do. And they move the bulk of the freight in this country. And someone should listen to them.

This administration desperately, desperately needs a check-mark in the “win” column. If anyone out there is listening, here’s your chance. It’s ripe for the picking, along with the block of voters it represents. Respond to the truckers on the ELD mandate. They deserve at least that much.

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