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"There are no traffic jams on the extra mile." -- Roger Staubach
By Advance Business Capital
We're pleased to open this column with a tip of the hat to the folks at LandLine Magazine. They're the first recipients of the Extra Mile award from the Truck Writers of North America (yes, that's a real group!) And in what's really got us pondering, they were recognized for a "social media campaign," not a traditional story.
What Happened
Three days before Christmas, 2009, hundreds of truckers found themselves broke and stranded on the road. Their fuel cards were shut off, their last paychecks were worthless and nobody was answering the phones at their company's headquarters. Arrow Trucking, the nation's ninth largest flatbed carrier, had simply shut down without a word.
Once they realized their company wasn't there for them, some drivers called the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. And as other truckers heard about the situation, they started calling OOIDA, too, asking how they could help.
OOIDA's LandLine staff "felt they couldn't treat this as just another news story,” says Norita Taylor, OOIDA media spokesman. Within hours, they had put out the word on Twitter™ and set up a Facebook™ page to coordinate efforts on behalf of stranded truckers. By the next morning there were over 1,000 Facebook™ followers, and more than 7,000 within 10 days. All told, several hundred drivers were helped with rides, meals, places to shower or sleep for the night.
Good as social media is, it's effective only if people go the extra mile. "Social media does reach its own limitations," says Taylor. "Somebody's got to pick up the phone and get in touch with someone."
Our Story So Far
You think you've still got spring cleaning? Just be glad you don't have to tidy up the Arrow Trucking mess. When the company filed bankruptcy papers in January, 2010, it claimed to have assets worth $100 million to $500 million. The court appointed Patrick Malloy as bankruptcy trustee. His duties would be to go over Arrow's books and generally shepherd the proceedings along.
On February 8, a creditors’ meeting was held. Normally at these meetings, company executives go over their assets and liabilities and creditors grill them about the situation. The Arrow case continued to be anything but normal, however, thanks to the murkiness of Arrow's books.
"We don't even know who the creditors are," said Patrick Malloy at the meeting. He optimistically added, "It will take a couple of weeks to get to the bottom of that."
Flash forward to the Ides (the 15th) of March for the next turn of the Arrow worm. The trustee filed a summary of Arrow Trucking's assets and liabilities in federal Bankruptcy Court in Tulsa. Remember those assets Arrow said were worth up to $500 million? Ooops! The trustee found that Arrow had $8.55 million in assets and $98.97 in liabilities.
Even more outrageous, among the so-called assets that Arrow had listed in January were the very trucks that it instructed drivers -- via a recorded phone message at company headquarters -- to turn back in to the leasing companies that own them.
Liabilities in the trustee’s report include $13.4 million in taxes owed to various states; $700,000 owed in back pay; and $156,000 in 401(k) contributions.
One bright spot in this mess is that employees with unpaid wages are "priority creditors." Employees who need to make a claim can do so through the clerk's office in the federal bankruptcy court in Tulsa. Meanwhile, we wish Mr. Malloy luck in cleaning up this colossal mess.
Don’t Be a Stranger
This talk of Facebook™, social media and ferreting out the real story, be it cooked books or human drama, has us thinking about the human need for staying in touch and the changing technology that lets us do it.
Smoke signals, for example, weren't just a figment of old westerns, and their use went far beyond the native peoples of North America. Chinese soldiers used smoke to signal from one watch tower to the next along the Great Wall, to astonishing effect. In only a few hours, a message could cascade along a distance of almost 200 miles.
And long before there was Twitter™, there were carrier pigeons. Used by the ancient Persians, Greeks and Romans, homing pigeons continued to spread the word all the way into the 20th century. The secret to having a bird deliver a message to one place and then bring back the reply? Train it always to eat in one location and sleep in the other. Effective, but it does limit your options for who you communicate with.
From its introduction in 1959, the CB radio has expanded those options. No wonder truckers embraced it. It was practical two-way communication, it was entertainment and, many times, it was a lifeline. By the 1970s and early 1980s, CB had reached its popular heyday. First Lady Betty Ford had a CB and publicly chatted on it; her handle was First Mama. CB slang was widely, if not correctly, used. Perhaps the CB craze was also giving us a taste of what was to come 25 years later, with chat rooms and cell phones.
To the general public, the CB has gone the way of the party-line. For the moment, iPhones™ and Twitter™ are at the top of the heap. Still, among long-haul truckers, the CB radio endures. It’s Bluetooth™-enabled now. A driver may have a mobile phone, too. But for 50 years, the CB been along for the ride, getting directions and traffic updates, holding conversation.
This story was drawn from LandLine magazine, Transport Topics and Truck World News .
www.advancebcap.com
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