Mandarins
People often ask me why I became a truck driver after I got a degree. I’ve tried various answers but in truth the reason is freedom: Freedom to make my own schedule; freedom to travel and see new things; the chance to actually work in other languages (I do a lot of work on the US-Mexico border and in Quebec and could not do my job without a working knowledge of French and Spanish.)
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!