I am finding this whole Occupy Wall Street movement fascinating. It has been several years since Stace and I realized that politics and voting are pointless. Pointless because both parties are bought and paid for by the uppity-up rich folk who actually control this country.

We weren’t talking about your garden variety rich folk, we were talking about the wealthy… the really wealthy. The people who control everything including the government but that you never even hear mentioned. I’m thinking of a bit Chris Rock did about the difference between “rich” and “wealthy” and how he didn’t want to be rich he wanted to be wealthy. He said something like “Shaq is rich. The man that signs Shaq’s paycheck is wealthy.” Stace and I didn’t call them the One Percent but that’s as good a name as any I suppose.

What I find so interesting about these protests is the reaction of the OnePercent. Obviously, they own the media so I was curious about how these protests would be covered in the news. Not surprisingly, the first few articles were utterly dismissive. They also spent some time belittling the protesters as a bunch of kooks who couldn’t even make up their minds as to what their goals were.

Then there was a spell where there just wasn’t any coverage at all to speak of about the whole thing. You really had to hunt for articles every day to see what was going on. But the protesters didn’t slink back into their holes, so they couldn’t just ignore them forever.

Right now they are painting the protesters as a bunch of filthy, loud, drug-dealing hooligans that the various cities are doing their best to accommodate… Well except for the city of Oakland who is putting Iraqi war veterans in the ICU with a fractured skull.

I think the single most interesting thing about the whole movement is the effect of the internet on the situation. The OnePercent is so used to being able to control what we see — and by extension what we think — that this whole YouTube and Facebook -based well of information available to everyone must be maddening to them. What are they going to do?

Are the days of them just being able to throw some divisive crap on the news, tell us to watch the monkey and go about screwing us at their leisure waning? Where are the articles about poor black kids robbing little old white ladies to get the rednecks worked up and voting for the conservative law-and-order guy? What about the articles about how the conservative law-and-order guy wants to lock up all the gays in Montana to send the liberals marching into the streets?

Can you imagine what would happen in this country if we all actually thought about it and realized that we are the 99 Percent? What if we realized that while we are fighting over how to divide up our increasingly smaller piece of the pie the OnePercent is sitting back with a whole bakery? What if we realized that gay rights, abortion rights, religion rights, smokers rights, the death penalty, health care plans, blah blah blah are “watch the monkey” issues they use to get us all worked up against each other and to keep us from realizing they are the ones we should be taking a good hard look at?

My God.

Can’t wait to see what happens next.

Have been thinking for several weeks that I would like to post over here again. So I thought I’d see if the old girl still works…

We’re back!

I have no idea what happened to the site but one day it just quit working and I had no idea how to fix it. Luckily the people at DreamHost really do offer excellent customer service… when you find time to go beg them for help that is.

As Stace mentioned (and I’m sure as many of you suspected anyway) there were many rules involved in picking our company name. Here are a few of them:

• Had to be something Fernando could remember at least 65% of the time when answering the phone.
• Absolutely could not under any circumstances contain any of the following words: Transportation, Transport, Transit, Trans, Express, Logistics, Freight, Cargo, Global, Distributor, Distribution, Enterprises, Service or Monkey. Ugh.
• Could not include my last name, Stace’s last name, the hybrid last name we invented to use when we play video games together, the kids’ name, the grandkid’s name, or Maggie’s name.
• Could not include the name of the town we live in, the name of the town Stace grew up in, or the town I grew up in, or the town in which we met a million years ago, or that cool town we visited that time on vacation, or that magical mystical town I was in during I that really cool dream I had where I was flying.
• Had to stand out from the crowd.
• Assuming that we would provide excellent service, it needed to be something a broker could remember a la “Man… we’re really in a bind… who was that company we used that got that load there a day ahead of schedule last month… oh wait I remember now… wasn’t it Global Logistical Cargo Transportation Services Enterprises, Inc.?”
• Should probably include at least a nod at ‘truth in advertising’ or some-such.
• Should remain true to our general life philosophy that one should really try to avoid taking themselves too seriously if at all possible.

I’m sure you can see how Highway Hags, LLC ended up being the only name we could think of that really fit the bill.

So we had the name all picked out then we needed to come up with a company slogan or catch phrase. You know like “GE — we bring good things to life” and all. As Stace mentioned, we finally settled on “We work harder… since we can’t rely on our looks” but originally I wanted it to be:

Highway Hags — “we work harder… since we can’t rely on our looks and apparently brains will only get you so far”

But Stace thought that one was too long. She said to think:

Motel 6 — “We’ll leave the light on for you”

not:

Motel 6 — “We’ll leave the light on for you and in the morning there will be coffee and cereal in the lobby and sometimes donuts but not all the time it just depends. Also, the rooms are fairly clean… oh sure, they’re not spotless or anything, but honestly what do you expect for $32 a night, anyway?”

I had to admit that I saw her point on that one. So I was wrong on the motto. I was not, however, wrong on the goober HeeHaw logo we currently have disgracing both sides of our tractor. Since we couldn’t afford a real (impressive) logo, we wanted to go with straight text for the time being and change it to a real logo when we had the chance. I already posted about how this plan went horribly horribly wrong, but I thought you might like to actually see the hideous outcome.

Here is what I wanted:

Well if I could figure out what’s wrong with my ability to add pictures there would be one here

And this is what we got:

Likewise a stupider more goobery logo picture here

Oh the humanity!

On the bright side, we just finished our first ever week and it went off quite well. We were able to keep running and only missed our weekly financial goal by $200 which wasn’t too bad considering it was our first week and Labor Day Weekend besides. Who knows maybe this whole thing will all work out… if not maybe we could get by on our looks somehow…

In the comments to the last post, Salena asked what we named the company. And the answer is:

Highway Hags L.L.C.

What else could it be, right?

It’s interesting to see different people’s reactions to it. In general, they either laugh, or they look at you like you’re nuts and ask, “Highway what?” I think this latter response stems from them not knowing how to take it, as if they don’t know if they should laugh or not. My thought is, we’re the ones calling ourselves hags, so it seems pretty certain it was done with a sense of humor. Ah well. People are funny.

Hedon has all sorts of reasons for why we went with the hag name, and she says she’s all ready to write a post about it, so I’ll leave that for her.

Meanwhile, we’ve been working on a company motto. The front-runner so far is:

Highway Hags — We work harder … because we can’t get by on our looks.

I’m thinking, we’ll be remembered.

Oh my god, I just booked our first load. It’s not the greatest load ever, and I wasn’t able to book the really great load that I had intended to follow immediately after it… but… Highway Hags just booked an actual real live load. From a broker. Off a load board no less. I seriously tried to sound like I knew what I was doing but who can say how that panned out. It’s a short load that picks up Monday afternoon so I guess we have the whole weekend to squirm in anticipation.

In other news… we finally got the lettering for the truck back. Sigh. We had decided that we couldn’t afford an actual logo and didn’t want some cheesy homemade job so we were going to go with just text. I went to all the trouble of laying it out exactly the way we wanted it and sent the file to the graphics place. Being small town folk, we had decided to go with a local printer. They were simply supposed to blow the art up to the proper size and cut the vinyl in royal blue. Then Stace was going to install it as she used to do some of that in a previous life. This was all supposed to be done last Friday. However, on Wednesday we still didn’t have anything from the print place. Finally Wednesday afternoon they called to say the art was finished — personally I think they were tired of our daily (polite) harassing phone calls.

Anyway, Stace went off to the joint, checkbook in hand, to pick up the art. She came home a little later with a hesitant look on her face and said, “Uh… they changed the layout on the signs.” Oh my god! Apparently they decided what we had sent them was too boring so they changed the font and layout to “spice it up a little.” Now it looks like some of the goobers from HeeHaw laid out our signs. Seriously. It’s all in this ridiculous font and has a little stripe of the dashed lane markings running through part of it and it’s just horrible. I accept that there wasn’t really anything to be done about it since we had already waited so long and to start over would cost us another week at home which we certainly can not afford but honestly… I hate it. Stace decided she could live with it for the time being but she didn’t much like it in the beginning, either. I think it is growing on her though. Hopefully it will grow on me, too. Sigh. At least the dot and vin numbers are correct… I guess that’s something.

On another note, when we finally called and officially told the Tulsa guys we were terminating our lease, the owner told me they were closing the doors to the company. I guess he is so down about the whole situation that he’s going to sell his truck and everything. I’m guessing we can kiss that escrow money goodbye. Not that I won’t keep trying but you can’t get blood out of a turnip or a stone or whatever the old saying is. I suppose we will survive, but it does piss me off to leave that money on the table like this. Sigh. Live and learn I guess.

On yet another note, aka the health front, I’m doing better than I was. It’s been over a week since I needed to use the cane which is great. Also, I have been able to run errands lately which is a vast improvement. I’m still nowhere near back to 100% but at least the pain is pretty much gone and I am capable of getting around now. When Stace and I first got ready to go back out on the road (with my doctor’s blessing) we ran into a problem because I couldn’t manage the steps to get into the truck.

Luckily Stace and her step-dad are both incredibly creative and brilliant at problem solving. Her step-dad, who we’ll call Leonardo, build this step thing that fits securely onto the running boards and splits the difference between the steps so I don’t have to try to get my foot so high. The problem is that Stace has to stand there with me and wait until I stepped up on the bottom running board step and scooted toward the back of the truck, then she would attach the temp step onto the bottom running board. Then I would step up onto it and up again onto the second running board step and scoot toward the back of the truck again. Then she would move the device up onto that step and I could step into the truck. Then she would hand the temp step up to me and I would stash it in the truck. It really was a pretty elegant solution to the problem of fixing a way for me to get in the truck without damaging the truck or attaching something permanent to the running boards.

The real problem I’m having right now is I’m still not able to get in on my own. Which is really frustrating. I know this is probably entirely because I haven’t been able to work out on it much at all while we have been at home these last couple of weeks. The paperwork we have had to deal with to get this all up and running has been incredible. I have spent the better part of every day sitting right here in front of this computer. That doesn’t exactly help the situation. So I understand why my comeback is going so slowly but it’s kinda maddening. Still… when I think of where I was four months ago compared to today… I can’t help but be grateful. It’s been a long steep climb so far but at least I’m still inching up the hill.

Well!  So!

Ok… so it’s not the greatest story ever told, but boy do I have a lot to say about it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to talk about all the crap that’s been going on until now.

Some of you may remember how we signed on as leased owner-operators with a tiny little company based in Tulsa, OK. This was way back in the early spring when we first bought the truck, but I wasn’t able to go out on the road at the time. Nothing lasts forever, thankfully, and I was finally well enough to go back out so we headed out for our first load with them in the middle of June.

I still wasn’t in too great of a condition so we weren’t able to run many miles at first. Which turned out to be a good thing the way things went down. At first we thought maybe they were just aggressively incompetent … then things started to look more sinister.

When we first talked to them they said their loads were averaging $1.70 to $1.75 per mile.  We agreed that Stace and I would receive 80% of the load. Not too bad. We had run the numbers and figured out that we could make a decent living on that deal. Not that we were going to get rich or anything but it was going to work out ok.

Then they decided we needed to pay for part of the cargo insurance. They asked for $3 per hundred of our part of the load. Well it isn’t that unusual for smaller carriers to ask their owner-operators to chip in on the insurance so we agreed when we signed the lease that we would pay it. Since it was only to be on our 80% of the load it would work out that we would now make 77.6% of the load. Sigh. Not great but still possible.

By the time we actually headed out on the road they had changed their insurance cut to 5% and they had decided it should be held out of the gross of the load not out of our 80%. So then we were down to making a flat 75% of the load. Sigh again. Ok, starting to get fairly grumpy, but still thinking we could make it work for a year or so until we felt ready to head out entirely on our own.

So we headed out to run our first load and got another surprise. The lease had specified that they would hold back one weeks’ settlements then we would be paid every Friday. No problem. But after we delivered our first load he said they had changed their payment method. They were now going to pay their owner-operators after every load but hold back 10% of the gross in “escrow” because their factor held back 10% of the load from them. So the deal was when they got paid the 10% by their factor they would pay us. Seriously big sigh. Not thrilled, but on the other hand it was kinda nice to get paid after every load and not have to wait two weeks for our first check. Ok, maybe we could live with it.

So if you’re following along with the math we had now dropped from 80% to 65% of the load. Really not thrilled at all by that point, but were still sure that we could squeak by on our 65% cut of loads that averaged $1.75 per mile. Besides, brokers typically pay in about 30 days so in a month we would have escrow checks coming in and bumping us back up a little. Maybe it would all work out.

And it might have worked out somehow… if there had been any $1.75 per mile loads that is. Weirdly, it seems like the only loads they could find for us were right at what we had informed them was our rock bottom minimum of $1.50 per mile. Hmmmm. We might never have caught on to the shenanigans that were going on if they had been slightly more capable as criminal masterminds. Our first clue that something was up was when the husband called and offered us a load for $1,100 which we accepted. Then later that day his wife, who ended up becoming the office-manager-dispatcher, called to give us more information about the load but she said it grossed $1,300. Hmmmm. So… the husband says the load grosses $1,100 and three hours later the wife says it grosses $1,300. Seriously, hmmmm.

Didn’t just happen once. Happened twice. Two different times they gave us different amounts for the gross. Based on those instances, it seemed pretty obvious to us that they were skimming off the top. But we weren’t 100% positive. And of course we would never accuse anyone without proof. Which we had no way of getting. We had the right to demand to see their actual confirmations on each load, but those are easily doctored so what good would that do us?

Things just went from bad to worse when the wife took over dispatching us a few days after we first went out. As I’m sure you can readily understand, we have no problem at all with women in trucking (for obvious reasons) but she had no experience whatsoever with the trucking industry. She didn’t understand that there are places where you simply don’t want to go because they have no freight worth anything heading back out. Places like Florida and southern Texas and California. Everyone knows this. Everyone except her. So we tried to explain to her that we would only go to those places if she looked ahead and had a good load lined up for us to drive back out at a decent rate. She never understood what we were trying to say. At least that’s what we thought at the time. We ended up sitting several times because she couldn’t find us a load that paid crap.

It may come as no big surprise that it only took a couple of weeks for Stace and I to decide that it just wasn’t going to work out being leased on with them. There was no way we were going to be able to make ends meet and beyond that we felt fairly sure they were robbing us blind. Obviously we weren’t going to stand for that. We started investigating getting our own authority and going completely independent. We had always heard how expensive the insurance was if you formed your own authority, but when we checked into it we were shocked to find out that we would pay less than we had been paying signed on to the guys in Tulsa. We set the wheels in motion.

It takes about a month for a new carrier’s authority to be granted, so it’s been a waiting game for quite a while now. But finally this week we went active. Woo Hoo! The big thing was that we couldn’t get onto any load boards until our authority was active. So we couldn’t check going rates for loads. What we were most worried about was what if the loads she had been getting for us really were as good as it got? We had figured the numbers very carefully and were sure that we could make it on $1.50/mile loads as long as we kept the whole thing not 65% of the load. Then we went active and I was able to finally get on load boards and check out the situation myself. Those filthy sons of bitches. I found all kinds of loads for $1.85/mile. Hell, I found loads for $2.35/mile. I even found a few for over $2.50 per mile.

On the one hand I was livid. I mean there were so many good loads out there that she would have had to of been a blithering idiot to only be able to find us loads for $1.45 to $1.50 per mile. It seems pretty certain they were skimming off of us on top of taking their 35% of what they said the load paid — which really pisses me off. On the other hand, boy was it a relief to see that there really are good loads to be had out there. We had figured our cpm before we made this move and had discovered we could get by just fine with $1.50/mile loads so even $1.85/mile loads will be great. $2.35/mile loads would just be awesome. Maybe we can finally start paying down some of the debt we have racked up while I was out of commission and while we were busy getting screwed by the guys in Tulsa. Hurrah!

We weren’t able to leave them until now because we are still trying to get paid for the last load we ran for them and thought keeping everything on the down-low might make it easier to get paid. But it’s been one excuse after another for why they haven’t been able to pay us. And get this… we have still never received a penny of the “escrow” money. Not even on the first load we ran which was over two months ago. Not sure what we are going to end up doing about that. Regardless, we are mailing our official letter informing them we are terminating the lease in the morning.

So… we still have a few loose ends to tie up, but we should be heading out this week with our own name on the truck door. Pretty damned exciting. And now that we will have finally been able to send off our letter of resignation to Tulsa, I can feel free to write here as much as I want about anything I want and not worry about them reading it.