Most significant is the freedom from that most horrid of people, the manager — that professional make work busybody, that same idealess,  average I.Q. lawn NAZI who dreams of little beyond orgasms and a good morning shit, that sometimes bully who has only enough passion to get angry at the people who stand up to him.

If I learned anything about life from trucking it was how little managers are needed. Seriously, take a good truck driver, give him some bad info about a load that needs to be delivered across the country within a certain amount of time and forget about it. This is a person who needs no supervision to accomplish a task. Someone who does need supervision cannot do the job, so the answer is simple: fire them.

So why have some trucking companies decided to try “the driver manager concept”? I’m working for one of these companies — for the moment — and it is amazing how effective managers are at destroying everything that made this job worthwhile: the freedom, the self reliance, the pride that came from knowing that you could be trusted to do a hard job well with no supervision, and the fact that there was no one breathing down your neck, justifying their existence by making you explain your actions to them hourly.

Best of all was the complete and total divorce from office politics, from the knife-in-your-back relationships with coworkers, and all the horribleness of that environment. All that mattered was job performance and how you dealt with the customers (just a little hint: usually I am respectful, but sometimes I have to give them a bloody nose. Its a rough job.)

Now I have all the disadvantages of life on the road and all the horrors of of life in an office cubical. These people offer no advantages to us  — none — and are experts at making it impossible for us to do anything other than obey and whine. Truckers are being transformed from tough minded, self starting, independent adults who never needed to be told what to do, into just another bunch of wage slaves who find themselves being treated like children. I’ve actually found myself acting like a kid, finding ways to sabotage the system not only because its often the only way to get the job done, but out of spite as well.

There must be an advantage for the company to form entirely new divisions, offices, and job categories and then employ, insure and equip them (and then hire managers to do the managing of them), but I can’t see it. Is it really such a threat to a company to have employees who don’t need to be told what to do? I’m not just asking this question to be a smart ass, I’m really curious. I would really like to know how any company is threatened by competent employees.

The worst part is the way these groups form little territories within a company and defend them against other departments, often working against each other in defense of their petty holdings, the greater fate of their employer be damned. The Chinese had a group of people like that once: the Mandarins (you know, those Chinese guys in the old pictures with the long creepy fingernails?) While there was no single cause for China’s inability to deal with the Europeans who sailed into Canton Harbor and demanded tribute, the Mandarins were almost certainly the most important. Now that I think about, the “driver managers” I’ve met actually have long, creepy fingernails — even some of the men!

Well, I suppose I shouldn’t complain, a lot of people these days don’t have any work at all. On the other hand, there is always that 5K per week job I was offered out of Hong Kong fighting pirates in the South China Sea. All expenses paid, including burial if needed!

I stopped by after two weeks and was told my tax preparer was not there at the moment but would call me that evening. Two weeks and several phone calls later — none of which were returned — I finally made a call where I was put on hold and was told “she will be with you shortly.” She wasn’t, so I hung up, got in my car and drove to their office, where I was told to sit and wait. I did, for over an hour. When I finally got to speak with my preparer I was told not only that I owed the I.R.S. several thousand dollars, but that H & R’s bill was — so far (they were still not done) — over $800.

I looked at this woman and asked what happened to the original quote. I don’t think I’ve been talked down to that badly since boot camp. I listened, then asked for my paperwork. I was told no, that I owed her and she would not return my paperwork until I paid her. I asked her why I owed her when I never agreed to the new terms and she ordered me out of her office. I left, without a years worth of receipts, records and other papers I needed to file my taxes.

You’ve been warned.

The google ads (which don’t seem to appear when I use linux) crank the volume *way* up, so the best thing to do is turn the volume down, push the slider to the right until you get to each ad — the ads are marked by short vertical lines — and play them. Then turn the volume back up, push the slider back to the beginning and watch the whole show ad free.

There is supposed to be a season prior to the season at the above link, but I haven’t found it yet.

This is a link to the closing theme music (by Peter Gabriel): Darker Star Reprise

While I was sick (at least sicker than I am now) I got so wrapped up in my own problems that I sort of left the internet. I did a few things here and there, wrote a review on Amazon, but I didn’t check my email (or for that matter my snail mail) for two months. Yes, it cost me some money, but it also cost the feelings of a friend of mine who lives overseas: he thought I had ended the friendship for some unknown reason. I was just so self absorbed with my own fears that I forgot about everyone else. I did a lot of apologizing over it but I was lucky he is one of those people who truly forgive and forget, and do so quickly.

My Google rankings have resolved themselves: If you google “Everything is Shit” you will find this blog on page one of the search, and its been that way for a couple of months, so I guess they decided I’m not affiliated with that Nigerian Prince that keeps trying to give me all that money. Perhaps I was wrong about Google, and they are not shit after all.

In the meantime I made some new friends this year, and they are a riot:  a group of Native American Harley riding Trekkies who dress as Klingons and ride around looking ferocious (they are actually some of the sweetest people I’ve met in decades.) I think they want me to to join them in their escapades, but I’m not sure that’s me — I just enjoy their company.

All is not lost, however: the comment spammers who bizerked this blog after google put it on page one have not abandoned me, if anything they have redoubled their efforts to make sure I never feel unnoticed again. Kinda makes ya feel warm and fuzzy, eh?

On the bad side, I cleared over a hundred spam comments out of my Akismet comment queue today. You people are costing me time. In fact, from this moment forward you are on notice: all spam comments (defined as comments that provide even a single link to any product being sold) will never see the light of day, will be deleted, and if I ever get lucky enough to find out who you are, be advised that I consider the time you are stealing from me to be valuable and I will charge you accordingly. The current rate that I am charging (subject to change at any time for any reason or no reason at all, with or without announcement, and may be backcharged to posts that were deleted BEFORE I changed the rate) is $10 per comment that you force me to delete. If you still choose to post spam comments, be advised that you are agreeing to the contractual relationship described above, and if I do find you, I will come to collect it with lawyers, guns and money (and you are agreeing to that too.) Have a nice day.

(Comments that are not spam [defined as comments that link to any non commercial site that is demonstrably relevant to the topic I am writing about] are not only excluded from the contractual relationship described above, but are welcome.)

What’s worse, you can find obscure blogs that use the word “shit” once, and you can find them repeated in the search results 10 to 15 times by the time you get to page 27! How can google claim to be a search engine when you can’t find a domain called “everything is shit” by typing the words “everything is shit”?

Worse still, there is a web site called “Everything is Shit.com” which is pretty cool, but it’s static: whoever put it up has written a short missive claiming that everything is shit and always has been. I enjoyed what the author had to say the one time I read it, and I even linked to his site. Nothing bad about it. Its just that its not the most profound thing I’ve ever read, and there is not much to it, and what little there is never changes, yet whenever I do a search for “everything is shit”, there it is at the top of page one. Is it possible half the world thinks this small group of paragraphs is so profound that everyone is linking to it? Is it possible that the author thinks that these few paragraphs are so important he spends weeks learning all the ever changing tricks to getting placed highly on google searches? I don’t see any money being made from his site so what is going on?

So far I’ve just been bitching (and let’s be honest, this blog/website is pretty much like that tree that fell in the forest: maybe it fell and maybe it even made a sound but who cares? I long ago stopped writing this for anyone but myself, and truth be told I’m pretty sure writing this blog in plain site has been the most private thing I’ve ever done — I doubt my own family would read it [even to be polite]); however, I think there might be something more than just bitching about my ratings here, and I think it reflects on the quality of google’s product.

This experience caused me to wonder if google is really all its cracked up to be. We have all gone through the horror of typing search terms into google, only to confront 3 million plus hits, much of it unrelated to anything we were searching for (I’ve often found it easier to search in google images than to do a google web search.) Curious, I started using Yahoo and found the search to be quicker, while the the results were more relevant. I had a similar experience with Dogpile — even LiveSearch was less frustrating. The only search engine that did not turn up results that were as good as google was Ixquick, which I still use sometimes because they respect our privacy and somebody needs to support them until they can match the other search engines (and when they do, they will be my only search engine.)

So, there it is. Google used to be a wonder. Now they have gotten so clever at defeating the search engine optimization experts that they outsmarted themselves and created a product that can’t find what you are looking for. Google, you have become shit.