General Motors Dispatcher - It is a reality...

     Well...here it is.  Doomsday.  Nico was right all along.  Now that it is happening there are so many things to consider.  Things we've never even dreamed we'd have to worry about.  The most difficult part to deal with is adaptation.  Adapting to the change in the economy, in convienience and most of all adapting to our world without oil.

    I had been telling my mother for weeks that the crisis was beginning.  Her retort was sarcastic as usual.  She remarked on the fact that it had begun years ago.  Especially when gas had become a dollar a gallon.    Needless to say when I showed her the spike in gas prices this morning,  we loosely discussed alternate avenues for heat come winter.  The oil heat is going to be too expensive to sustain in this large house.  She mentioned moving and of course I shot her down.  Why move and incur more expenses?  Seems like a waste of money to me.  I explained the possibility of biofuels becoming more available and we also kicked around the idea of converting to electric heaters.  We definetly have some number crunching to do.
     
     Mostly, I wonder how this is going to effect work.  I'm a dispatcher for a company that shuttles car parts to the local General Motors plant assembly line via tractor/trailers.  We don't use outrageous amounts of fuel (the plant is eight miles away) but the price of fuel has got to put a dent in company's pocket.  It already costs approximately $400 for one tank of diesel in a tractor.  It takes about three days of work to burn through that one tank.  That's around  fifteen to twenty trips per tractor per day.  I have probably 13 to 15 available tractors for my shift.  I run ten drivers per shift.  So...15 trips times 8 miles both ways is 240 miles per day per tractor.  That is gonna be rough.  Production at GM has picked up in the last couple weeks, but I'm curious as to what the buzz will be when I get there this afternoon?
 
     If people can't afford fuel, how will they afford to purchase a vehicle?

     I might not have a job in the next few months. 

Current Mood: scared