Rearview Reflections: Unwinding Our Journey through 2023 and Looking Forward to What’s Next
A Truck Driver’s Rearview Reflections
I cannot believe we are staring down the last 90 days of 2023!
Friend,
Thanks to our full team of interstate drivers, it's been a while since I've been on the road—traversing mountains, rolling over hills, and passing state lines. I enjoy the road. This trip, in particular, gave me a chance to ponder the last few years of mountain-like obstacles, hill-sized annoyances, and boundaries that seemed impassable at times: the Covid-19 pandemic and its accompanying shutdowns, the Great Resignation and a smaller hiring pool, and inflation and economic uncertainty. Navigating the last few years certainly has demanded resilience from all of us.
Speaking of resilience, as I approached a port of entry, A.K.A., truck scale, on this journey, it brought back memories of a challenging incident at a similar stop many years ago. During that trip, I arrived at a scale facility on the Washington-Idaho border around 4:45 on a Friday evening. At that point, the scale official and I discovered that someone in Sacramento had made a clerical error that made it appear that I was only allowed to drive within California. Despite all the official paperwork and evidence to the contrary, the unreasonable official would not let me drive my truck out of the scale. At that moment it was 5:15 pm, and no one in Sacramento would be available until Monday morning at 9 am to correct the matter and set me free! What's a truck driver to do?
Lesser moving companies might have taken this as a reason to skirt the law and direct their drivers to avoid the scales in the future. They might also have directed the driver (and any accompanying 4-legged, furry friends) to hang tight for two and a half days until the paperwork could be straightened out. This, of course, would delay the truck's following delivery, leaving a client without their belongings for a few days. But not Camelot! We pride ourselves on a trustworthy fleet and schedule! So, we resiliently opted to fly a driver out to Washington State, where I was stranded. He literally took the wheel from me and drove us home...legally and on time.
As Camelot approaches its 40th year of business, it's our resilience that has helped us leap past our biggest hurdles: the poor economy and housing market of the 1990s, the Great Recession of 2008, and evolving emissions requirements for our fleet in the last decade. I'm sure each of us could make a similar list of obstacles that we have overcome, whether personal or professional. As 2023 winds down, I hope that we can give ourselves a well-deserved pat on the back and look forward to 2024 with eager anticipation, knowing how resilient we are.